directional area shadows

[Gijs]

currently, when turning on area shadows for a directional light, it changes your light into a spot. Of course there is a workaround by placing the directional light far away from your scene and use a large radius, but it would be nice if Vray could handle this.

Gijs

[dbuchhofer]

Its sort of a limitation of the 'Directional' part of it..

If you think about it, since the light rays are coming in parallell as if they were coming from an infinite distance, there isn't going to be any possiblity of an area shadow since the light rays are not coming from a specific area.. they are coming from a DIRECTION..

If you were to attempt to do this, you would end up with a spot light..

Not sure that that helps explain.. think of an area shadow direct light as a vraylight of infinite size..

[Gijs]

Theoretically you are right, but how farther the light source, how more parallel the light beams will appear. The sun's diameter is not infinite (about 1.4 million km), neither is its distance to the earth (about 150 million km). The distance is large enough though to make shadows appear parallel and the diameter - distance ratio is large enough to create visible area shadows.

Gijs

[RErender]

The sun always rises

[percydaman]

not where I li-... oh wait, there it is...