heyas; what control do i need to turn up where to get the soft shadows to stop being scattered dots? i can find the volumetric quality control, but not the soft shadow one. im using a global radiosity with a gain of 1 and no indirect anything checked. turning up that quality boost slider had no effect. i have three shadow-casting lights with 20% blur. there's no quality slider on those. the render options are: user-- apply materials enable sub-rays -ray traced shadows -ray traced transparency (reflections are turned off because i dont have any) enable super-sampling -soft shadows NO depth of field NO motion blurring OFF: optimizing volumetric stuff OFF: optimizing last render pass advanced effects quality: 100% anti-aliasing: enabled. (i didn't edit these settings.) what thing do i tweak? thanks, guys :)

Under 'User -> Object Anti Aliasing', you should play with Min and Max number of rays. Try increasing the minimum number of rays. This will force a better distribution of rays for soft shadows. You can also try to use Hybrid 2.5D shadows instead of Raytraced shadows. They are faster and they work great in some cases (if you are not too concerned with the accuracy of the shadows).

oh yeah, duh... anti-aliasing. of course! are there any tips for min/max rays and anti-aliasing and stuff? the quality boost slider seemed to have almost no effect. the max rays had much more. im at 16/32 min/max now, and that is starting to look good. i wonder if 20 is a magic number for 20% blurred shadows...? you know, stuff like that. i dont have hybrid 2.5d shadows. that i know of. i only have vue 5 d'esprit normal. ;) thanks :)

Also a decisive factor is the render settings. Most often with soft shadows not even "Ultra" is enough. You should enter the custom settings and set values higher than those of ultra mode.

Vue 5 doesn't have soft shadows implemented, so don't look for them, you need at least 5 ProStudio for them. 20% soft shadows is a lot, and needs a lot of anti aliasing to avoid the artefacts you are experimenting. What I often do is reduce the shadows to 80% instead of the preset 100%, and give it a 5% softness. The shadows are still 100% accurate, since they raytraced, and won't need as much anti aliasing. As for +1 i radiosity, I don't think it's worth it, and the render time will be excrutiating! You might consider buying the "lighttune" extra module for Vue5 that will allow soft shadows maps, it's the cheapest module of all four modules, and comes in handy sometimes ( but far less accurate that normal shadows, though.)

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5/index.php?Page=3

As for the Min/Max settings, I always start with setting the Min low (5) and raising the Max a lot (20). That way, only areas that require additional rays (soft shadows, blurred reflections, depth of field...) will get the boost of rays and other areas will get the usual amount of rays.

Message edited on: 07/25/2005 11:24

Well, I was just giving my method, that's it. Sure you have raytraced soft shadows with 5 esprit, I was reffering to shadow maps that come only with pro stutio or infinite. My bad english I guess!

Attached Link: http://www.altuit.com/webs/altuit2/VueLab/TestRenders.htm

Here are a couple of images processed by the Demo copy:

BEFORE

AFTER

For having worked in that field (image filtering), I can say this plugin is impressive ! Thanks for sharing ... I will add it to my list :)

anyone tried using Shadow Maps?? :)

@Silverblade: the guy who started this thread has Vue5, no shadow maps, then.