I've been playing with the demo of Vue4 and I like it a lot! I miss a few things in the lighting options though and was wondering if V5 had the extra features (I'll try the 5 demo when I change over to broadband which should be in the next couple of weeks! :o) You don't seem to be able to change the shadow colour in 4, is this possible in 5? There only seems to be one type of shadow in 4, are there others in 5? For instance in Cinema4d you can select Hard, soft or area shadows. Is there an aiming option in V5? This is another feature in Cinema I find really useful, you can select any object as a light target just like the aim at camera option in V4. Is there an easy way of constructing a light dome in Vue? For instance could you place lights at the vertices of a sphere object? Obviously I could construct one manually but it's a pain in the butt! Thanks for any help in advance! :o) - Baz

Attached Link: http://www.e-onsoftware.com/Products/vue5/modules/lighttune/

Shadow colour is mainly an aspect of the ambient light colour in the atmosphere settings. Types of shadow. Not sure about the base V5E, but in Vue 4 Pro and with the Lighttune plug-in for V5E there are quite a lot of controls over light (see link). Including soft shadow maps or hard ray traced. Aiming is available in V4. Select your light, then in the properties pallette (top-right) select the animation tab and set which object to track. This does a point at. No auto light dome function by default, although you could use scatter and replicate if you can work out the correct settings, or with the Pro versions you can use a python script. Vue 5 also gives you the options of setting up global illumination or radiosity lighting models in your atmosphere settings, neither of which were available in V4.

Excellent! Thanks a lot yggdrasil, that's a big help!:o) - Baz

In Vue a light can be set to cast hard or soft shadows by changing the value of softness in the light's options panel at the top left. Increasing it above 0 degrees softens the shadows the light casts.

Thanks Impish, it's the same in Cinema when using soft shadows. Increasing shadow map size increases the sharpness of the shadows. I'm guessing that adjusting shadow softness in Vue alters the shadow map size too. The problem with that is that larger shadow maps increase render times so in Cinema there is also the option to use hard shadows which don't use a shadow map at all and render very quickly. There are also area shadows which mimic real life shadows and get sharper the closer they are to the casting object. VERY slow though! It sounds like there are similar options in the more advanced versions of Vue :o) - Baz

Shadow softness affect ray traced shadows in Vue. Shadow maps are available in Vue 4 Pro, Vue 5 Pro and Vue 5 Infinite. They can be added to Vue 5 Esprite by buying the LightTune module. Changing the soft shadows angle simulates a light source having a size and not being a point for shadow calculations. This does increase the render time because it results in extra rays having to be calculated. In the versions of Vue with shadow maps increasing the shadow map size increases render times if I remember right from experimenting with it a while ago.

Thanks for the info!