Hi Guys n Girls

Its bound to be me but I cant work it out.

I'm not getting any ground shadows rendered when I render in FireFly. I'm using the manual settings to get big renders for print.  But no cast shadows anywhere. Even with Cast Shadows option ticked  The shadow is there is the preview and when I am working on the model but..... no shadow in final render.... and its bugging me big style !!!

I'm using P7 on Mac OSX 10.4.11

Help

Drky xxx

You probably need to uncheck the "shadow catch only" option for the ground plane in the material room (advanced view).

Quote - You probably need to uncheck the "shadow catch only" option for the ground plane in the material room (advanced view).

Hmmmmm nope... this just did completely weird things to V4..... I just know its gonna be something really simple that i should do or havent done,,,,,,, grrrrrrrr !!!!!  :)

Unchecking "Shadow Catch Only" shouldn't affect any model in the scene.  It certainly doesn't on my P6, at least.

Are the lights actually casting shadows?  That's a totally different option from the Cast Shadows you selected in Render Settings, btw.  It's on the light parameters.

Also, if it's a big scene, Depth Mapped shadows (which you really shouldn't be using anyhow) will often refuse to render correctly, if at all.

Quote - Unchecking "Shadow Catch Only" shouldn't affect any model in the scene.  It certainly doesn't on my P6, at least.

Are the lights actually casting shadows?  That's a totally different option from the Cast Shadows you selected in Render Settings, btw.  It's on the light parameters.

Also, if it's a big scene, Depth Mapped shadows (which you really shouldn't be using anyhow) will often refuse to render correctly, if at all.

In preview the shadow is there... but render it and there it is 'gone'....
In light parameters doing anything with that shadow setting just sees it re-set to its 1.000 default, not allowing me to do anything with it.

The mystery deepens
Drky xxx

In preview you see the "Ground Shadows", which are just very simple helper shadows for placing your scene elements. They will NEVER render.

If your scene has large dimensions, mapped shadows will become very blurred, to the point that they're not noticeable anymore. Chainge to raytraced shadows in large scenes. You'll want to set the blur radius to something else tnan 0.0 (I ususally use a number between 3 and 10).
And, of course, don't forget to set your render options manually. The slider settings in the standard Firefly options dialog are not very usable.
My default Firefly render setup is:

• cast shadows on;
• raytracing on;
• smooth polygons on;
• displacement maping on;
• minimum shading rate 0.50
• irradiance caching 0
• raytrace bounces 2
• bucket size 64
• minimum displacement bounds 0
• pixel samples 3
• post filter size 1;
• post filter type box.

3/25/08

*"If your scene has large dimensions, mapped shadows will become very blurred, to the point that they're not noticeable anymore."

Would using the huge sky dome as per bagginsbill qualify as a scene with large dimensions?

LMK

It would. Look through the shadow cam of an infinite light, by default you'll see the whole scene, including the skydome.
You can manually reduce the area that the shadow map has to cover using the zoom and pan dials of the shadow cam, or you can switch to raytraced shadows. My personal preference is raytraced shadows. Slower, but more accurate, no matter the size of the scene, and they tend to use less RAM.

3/25/08

Ouch! I should have know this, and it certainly explains why my shadows disapppear at a certain place in my workflow. I couldn't figure out why the application was rendering shadows, but the shadows could not be seen. AND LESS RAM? RAM limitations is my biggest single problem. Rendering more slowly is a whole lot better than rendering never. I have to experiment with this when I get home.

THANKS SVDL.

I love this forum.

LMK

drft, post screencaps of render settings, lite settings, obj properties etc.
that the experts might better advise.  otherwise, you know the drill with OS X:
start up from installl disk, run "disk repair", run "repair permissions", restart.
leave computer on at nite.

Well, it does seem to help quite a lot.

Another thing that can have dramatic impact on memory usage is texture filtering. My latest upload here contains 8 human figures, all with strand based hair, rendered with Texture Filtering set to Fast. When it still was set to Quality, FFRender crashed with an OOM at 6 figures...

My TextureFilter script could be useful here (Poser 7 only). Setting texture filtering manually for all imagemap nodes is a drag, this script will let you set the quality to None, Fast or Quality for the current prop, figure or scene. Shameless plug, I know, but hey, it's freestuff.

svdl, I'm having some difficulty with shadows and AO.  In a scene to test a light package for the market place, I'm using AO on my IBL light and a material based AO node on the floor as suggested in one thread that I read by Bagginsbill. Sometimes the shadows on the floor just about disappear, but will be present on the wall behind my demo figure. Should I remove the material based AO node from the floor? My shadows are ray traced, not depth mapped.

A small heads up, setting irradiance caching to 0 will reduce quality of ambient occlusion - at least according to the manual, which is occasionally wrong.  As far as I remember when fooling around with it that seemed to be true though.  Also I've found that enabling AO for an IBL light produces pretty "dirty-looking" shading, although maybe there is a combination of settings that works well that I didn't find; I think it's a lot cleaner to put AO on the material where you want the shading to occur.

I have also found that sometimes Smooth Polygons will cause very incorrect AO shading to be applied on some models, so for those models I turn it off (DAZ cyclorama comes to mind).

Quote - It would. Look through the shadow cam of an infinite light, by default you'll see the whole scene, including the skydome.

Perhaps, but only if you forgot to do something very important - disable shadows on the skydome. The automatic inclusion of scene elements into the shadowcam viewport is based on things that cast shadows. If an object does not cast shadows (as a skydome should not) then it will NOT expand the shadow map to cover that object.

Apparently, 99 means "don't cache". And, apparently, there are situations where caching at all (even at 98) will make AO disappear.

Made my skydome visible again, but I shrank it so it's not so big. AO is back, but still crappy at IC=50.

So - there is something about a large scene that does break AO, even if an object does not cast shadows.

Very annoying that there is such a huge visible difference between 98 and 99. 

the occlusion error (in the python manual) is = 1- IC/100.
hence IC=98 is double the error of IC=99, whilst IC=50 is double the error of IC=75.

Miss Nancy:

Heheh. Go look at my renders again. The occlusion "error" at 98 is infinite. There is NO shadow at all.

gadzooks, yer right!  but there may have been some errors in the way FFRender calculated
some of that arcane AO and GI stuff in poser 7.  see if it works better in the poser pro beta.

You know, either way he probably can't tell you ;)