Hy there!

My question is simple : is there any way to reduce the shadows from renders , when you are using shadows in the FireFly engine?And how?

Thank you in advance!

Best regards!

Not sure what you are asking.

Your choices are to turn them off totally, to set their blur on the edges, or to lessen the light so that there are less shadows, or to add more lights, so that they cancel out each others shadows. Then you could also use the ambient Occlusion to give you shadows only on the creases and corners.

Can you explain better exactly what you want to do? 

I asked about this too because the default shadows are pitch black.

I was told to go into the parameter dials for each light and lower the shadow intensity.  It works really well.  I usually change it to  between 60 and 80.

You can also go into the properties area of the parameter dials and turn off shadows for certain items/parts.  I always turn off cast shadows for hair that is neck length or longer as I don't like the black voids at the neck that long hair tends to have with shadows turned on.

If you don't want a floor shadow, before you render, go to the parameter dial properties and hide the ground.

This is what I want to obtain...:)

Normally in such a render , my shadows are too rough , too dark , and cover too much of the surface , for example for a sassy hair , it will cover most of the model's face.

"Your choices are to turn them off totally, to set their blur on the edges, or to lessen the light so that there are less shadows, or to add more lights, so that they cancel out each others shadows. Then you could also use the ambient Occlusion to give you shadows only on the creases and corners."

 - and how you do all of that?

Hi Black star, If you use depthmap shadow (rendering shadowmap), there are a lot of controls. It takes a long time to get "the effect" you seek. When you get a good lightset, save it to lightlibrary or, better yet save it as a pz3(saves shadowcam). The short answer , mo, is shadowmap lights do not penetrate transmap hair very well. They leave a broad dark shadow where you should get mottling from the hair strands. Raytrace shadows cut through transhair too well and can even cast an eyelash shadow. Raytrace lacks the shadow blur/finesse of shadowmap spots, though. Blending the 2 together is probably the simple answer. This is what I used to do in P5.

Arey Soul has a set of free lights in a thread found in their forums.  Perhaps you might try one of those sets to see if they help you with better shadows.

Sorry, I don't have a link as my laptop died and I can't access my bookmarks.

I think you'll potentially run into problems using raytraced shadows with transmapped hair - I had problems with light casting shadows only of the hair and not the head, which lead to odd shadows across the body.

I'd use depth mapped shadows. Learn what the parameters settings do. Increase the shadow map size to 512 or higher, get optimum results focusing the lights using shadow lite cams, and maybe reduce the shadow blur radius. Lower the bias settings (you can go very low with depth mapped shadows). Also, render settings can make a whole heap of difference, especially Minimum texture sizes with using transmapped hair.

Do some forum searches here for things like Transmapped Hair, Depth-mapped shadows and Shadow lite Cams. There have been some really interesting threads.