artificial light shadow

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1

Why do artificial lights cast such ultra-sharp shadows after they hit an object? Is there any way to make the shadows softer? When I place multiple ceiling lights, the shadows overlap and it doesn’t look good because they all create very sharp edges.

Kind regards, Sander.

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2

Yet another problem that will never be fixed.
It makes artificial light sources virtually unusable.
All that would be needed is a setting to adjust the sharpness of artificial sources, just like for natural light.
But that seems to be less important than implementing completely useless tools to promote new economic partners… (Veras, AI enhancer, Impact, etc.)

3

When using ray-traced artificial lights, sharpness of shadows can be directly be controlled via the size of the light source. Large area lights will then cast soft shadow, while a small point light source casts sharp shadows, as physically correct.

You can find more on that in our blog post on the feature:
https://blog.chaos.com/advancing-realism-ray-traced-artificial-lights

Without ray tracing physically correct soft shadows for artificial lights are not possible, so the shadow softness is only approximated coarsely.

Note: Depending on the CAD there might be limitations which area light types are currently supported (in SU spot lights don’t have that property accessible yet).

Hope that helped!