Help - Cannot locate Vrayshadow Plugin

[watson44]

I'm currently running Vray Educational version 1.5RC3 and I'm trying to experiment with shadow casting. My scene setup is very simple. It includes a simple plane (ground surface), hemisphere (background) with normals flipped, an extruded enclosure with door and windows cutout, Vray Sun with intensity set = 1, and a vrayphysical camera inside the enclosure with a small paramid that the camara is focused on. Enabling shadow in the Global Switch section causes extreamly dark (nearly black) rendering which makes the entire rendered scene useless. Unchecking the shadow option I get a reasonable rendering by adjusting the camera settings but no shadows.

In searching the forum, I've found many mention of the Vrayshadow plugin. I can't find that plugin in my installed version. My plugin manager has the following path: Standard MAX plug-ins, Additional MAX plug-ins, V-Ray additional plug-ins but VRayshadow is not shown in the list of available plug-ins. Do I need to download that plug-in separately?

Thanks for any help.
Ayoola

[instinct]

The shadowplugin is part of the coreplugins. no extra files to be installed. It aint needed for the vraysun tho, it's only an additional option for standard lights. I assume the hemisphere is casting the shadow. try sticking the background in the environment slot OR set the shadowcasting to off for the background hemisphere.

Thorsten

[watson44]

instinct

Thanks for the reply and I'll try your suggestion. However I'm still wondering why the Vrayshadow plug-in does not show in my list os plug-in. Any suggestion?

[RErender]

The "shadow plugin" is built into the max lights, look in the shadow type drop down, you should see raytrace, shadow map etc. including vrayshadows.

[watson44]

Thanks for the replys.
Everything worked you suggested. Many Thanks.

Ayoola.