United3dArtists Archive

Ok, 7.61 WorkSpace.. Directional light, Shadow Map 2048,
and the PCF slider slid over all the way to the right...
Still NO soft shadows... All sharp edges...
I've got an ATI X600 256 meg VRAM. Help....

Try it with a Spotlight.

theres some info here on ATI cards and shadows , I dont know if this is what you are experiencing , in any case the thread may be useful.

http://forums1.caligari.com/truespace/s ... ics&page=2"

thanks
Paul

I still can not get soft shadows........

Is this for realtime or for a render?

Take a look at Chapter 7 in the PDF manual and see if that helps...too much info to repeat here.

It's for WorkSpace (Real Time). Also, I have a shadow map problem.
Can't get rid of jaggy shadow edges on objects. Going from a
shadow map size of 2048 to 4096 makes no difference. Model is
plenty sub-divided too. Only 2 lights... One Infii lite (no shadows) and
one Directional light (shadows). I've got 256 meg Video Ram on an
ATI X 600 Card. "This" and not being able to get softshadows
bringing me down............

When you say the PCF slider is all the way to the right. Try bring it down one, If it is the option I remember when you take it all the way to the top it activates some special video card driven shadow processing, and always screwed up my shadows. I always set my shadows to 1 less than all the way on that slider, set the sampling all the way up, and then set teh map size to 2048. Hope it helps, but if not there are a lot of setting to play with. good luck.

ATI cards (at least older/ budget ones) lack the ability to hardware filter shadows. This is why they look bad (in truespace).

It could have been different, I mean games always look good on ATI cards, but I think this was one of those now legendary "what were Caligari smoking" moments.

I am not an expert on workspace side of things but I think you might want to try using multiple lights with varying power output to cast differing shadows. The renderer may then interpolate shadow values for you creating a soft shadow.

Is this for a still or an animation? If a still try having a look at the multipass rendering course ... I watched this for the first time a few days ago and it really opened my eyes on post process workflow (one of the exercises is creating a soft shadow).

Keep us posted, I can get real creative ....

Starting with the obvious, have you played around with the 'File/HW Settings' panel?

All I can get from a single directional light is hard shadows, I think the suggestion of making an array of them is a good one.

Any reason that you can't switch light types to ones that are better at soft shadowing? (Spots, Areas, etc?)

My vid card is even less advanced than yours, so unfortunately realtime isn't my favorite thing.

Yes, I've tried the HW settings and played around quite a bit with the
sliders and filter ect..... I'm affraid it's probably my ATI video card.
(ATI X600 256 VRAM). I've tried Spot lites too... No GO... (It's for an
animation). Really like my notebook but I'm probably gonna need a
new one with 1 gig Vam and an NVidea for tS7.61. I'll keep playing
aroiund a bit more though..... I'm finding that real time can be quite
addicting..... and then some....