Soft shadows with spherical light

Enscape Host Applications Enscape for SketchUp
1 
Hey guys!

I'm developing a scene that has a lamp on a table. However, when inserting the spherical light inside the lampshade, the projection of shadows becomes very sharp.

Is there any way to make the shadows cast by spherical light softer?
2

Hi! What modeling program are you using? For example, Archicads soft lights are not well handled by Enscape

3

Hi @jor_cg

Welcome to our forum!

By chance do you have shadow sharpness turned all the way down? You can find that in the Visual Settings Tab - Atmosphere - Shadow Sharpness.

4

I have the same problem.

Shadows sharpness settings only affect sun shadows.
Spherical lights are casting very sharp shadows and it’s a big problem for me.

I would like to soften the shadows incoming from the spehical lights inside the nest pendants.

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5

Hello everyone,

This can be achieved using the “Ray-Traced Artificial Light” setting from the General Settings > Rendering.

In addition to single point light sources getting better shadows, we also have better support for emissive materials as light sources that are integrated into our Ray-Traced Artificial Light setting.

You can see a video demonstration of that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ks4aZW678b0

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6

I already use ray traced artificial light…

7

I see that the shadows that are very sharp are on the beams that are very close to the light and that makes sense; the shadows further away are getting rougher. Maybe changing to a sphere with emissive material changes the behavior?

8

It would be great to be able to soften artificial light shadows in the same way as natural light shadows.

IRL Artificial light shadows are rarely as sharp as those produced by enscape. This gives rather strange results when there are many sources and therefore many sharp shadows generated…

Actually disabling ray traced artificial light has a better outcome.
It’s less “realistic”, but at least the overall image and architecture isn’t altered by very sharp shadows cast everywhere.

9

Another thing to try would be increasing the “Light Source Radius” of the Spherical Light and maybe decreasing the “Luminous Intensity” if things get too bright.

10

I already tried.

I’ve also tried replacing spherical lights with spheres + luminous textures. this has the effect of completely eliminating cast shadows. The result is similar to that obtained by deactivating ray traced artificial lights.

Thank you for the time you have devoted to my “problem”.

11

Then unfortunately we are kind of out of options as things currently stand. I will inform the team that we might need a way to separately control how sharp the shadows are for artificial lights.

If you could also write this as an idea in our Ideas portal to track general interest, it would be much appreciated! https://chaosenscape.ideas.aha.io/