Motion Blur and Shadow messed up - but fixed

[Morne]

Hi All

I found a problem (well a new problem to me anyways) with using VRay physical sun, sky and camera and also standard lights. I had a situation where I had a scene with sun sky cam but then also some standard lights to create "fake" shadows. The VRay cam was set to motion blur with default settings. The standard light had VRayShadow and then my objects shadow gets stretched and faded so big that you cant almost see it. To fix this I just changed the shadow type in the standard light from VRayShadow to VRayShadowMAP.
If only now ChaosGroup can update the help files to include VRayShadowMap, I'll be happy. For example what implications does if have to have the mode of vrashadowmap set to single frame on an animation and the other way around? What does the filter method do? Some help please. And how do I make the shadow smoother on the edges and not so chunky or "pixelated"?

Ok so it seems pushing up the resolution of the shadow from default 512 to 2048 makes it little smoother. I'm geussing this uses more memory and renders slower. I've also opted for setting the mode to flythrough and holding thumbs there is no flickering or other problems I'm not aware of yet...

Maybe this info will be usefull to somebody at some time.

Kind Regards,
Morne

[vlado]

Yep, the help will be updated, but in short:

If in "single frame" mode, the shadow map will be discarded for each animation frame; in "Fly-through" mode, the shadow map is reused from one frame to the next, and only filled in with the missing information (this is useful for fly-through animations to save some render time).

To smooth (blur) the shadows, increase the "Filter" value. If the shadows become too blurry, you can increase the "Resolution" parameter.

The "Exact" filter method is slower (especially for large Filter values), but is smooth in the sense that it does not produce noise. The "Fast" method is, obviously, faster for large Filter values, but it introduces some noise (which can be reduced by increasing the "Filter subdivs" parameter).

Best regards,
Vlado

[Morne]

thanks Vlado

I've already sent 3 jobs to backburner as per above scenario. So far it is rendering pretty quick so should know soon if I have to tweak the settings you mentioned.

[Morne]

ok so 2 of the 3 animations had no problems, but the 3rd had crazy stuff happening with my tree shadows so I just switched to VRayshadaow again and switched off motion blur for 3rd animation. It was a rush job, but client was very happy with results and it serves their purpose...