where are my shadows??

[super gnu]

well ive been struggling with blown out lighting around objects in my current scene,and have spent two weeks working round the problem... whilst digging through my scene today , it turns out objects more than a certain distance from my sunlight (direct light with vray shadows) are not casting shadows....

having hidden all in the scene except one bench and the floor, ive moved the sun till the bench casts a shadow (about 30 m from the ground!) trouble is the buildings around it are taller than that, so i cant have my sun that close! whats goin on??

ive got NO attenuation of any kind and by bias is set to 0 (tried other settings) there are no excludes in operation, and the objects all have shadowcasting on.

wierdy wierd... not seen this before and ive been using the same setup for lighting for years...

[super gnu]

oh and if i switch to shadowmap, i get shadows.. (crappy ones, but shadows at least! )

[Syclone1]

Have you tried adjusting the shadow bias in the light parameters? On larger scenes I sometimes have to change it to 0.01

-dave

[super gnu]

tried that...see above... thx anyway!

[vlado]

If you still keep the simplified scene, you can try sending it to me at vlado@chaosgroup.com and I will take a look.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

ive sent a file over... spect its something really obvious thaat ive missed...

[RErender]

Do you have "overshoot" on? the light will only cast shadows within the falloff cone

[super gnu]

naa, thought of that...never use that one, so would have been surprised if it was on!


looks like it may have something to do with the near attenuation setting, even though i have attenuation turned off... if i "show attenuation" thingy, i can see the boundary between shadow casting and not shadow casting lines up with the near attenuation start range... which is odd, because i DEFINITELY have them all off...

bug perhaps?

[paulison]

RErender basically said this, but since i've also had this problem in the past i thought it would be worth saying:

make sure you set your light cone to a size that is bigger than your entire project, then tick overshoot.

[vlado]

super gnu, it's because you have set your Secondary Rays bias (in the Global switches rollout) to 0.01; set it to a lower value (or 0.0) and it will be fine.

Best regards,
Vlado

[super gnu]

not sure how that got changed... thanks a lot guys... must have been tweaking it because of some double faces... ive been on this project too long!