I did some testing with hi res shadowmaps this morning, and my 256meg PC can handle up to 8000 in size. To increase the setting double click the shadow map size dial and increase the maximum limit. All the dials on light 4 and up is set to +- 100 000 in my poser, is this normal or have the RSR bugged out? First is the normal 1024 shadowmap.

Heres a 6000 map

And finaly 8000, close up.

Thanks :) I always wondered...

That's a really great figure and texture, btw. I had fooled around with shadow maps like this some time ago. (But ceratinly not at the sizes you are using) My question is; would anyone really want to use a shadow map this high? And, my point being is that your highest setting makes the shadow look exactly like a Bryce 4 shadow, very hard-edged. Bryce people are ALWAYS trying to get rid of that hard edge, and trying to have soft shadows like Poser naturally can. Great test, though. Was always curious about what a REALLY big shadow map would look like. Cool character. Agent Smith

That's an interesting test, thank you for sharing. :) I have an unrelated question though: your last image looks wonderfully sharp. What settings did you use to compress it into a jpeg image? Or is it so sharp because it's a big closeup?

yes, that image quality at 56kb jpg at that dimension (968pixels by 807pixels) is wonderful. very good, how did you do it? :) (it amazes me how too many people just love the gaussian blurgh. )

Wow, those are some killer eyebrows. Is that an original texture?

I was never clear on what Shadow Maps were for. Thanks I can use this info.

Outstanding. You learn something new everyday around here. Great job.

With all due respect to the master Staale and this discovery, all this only addresses half the factors without taking into consideration the settings of the ShadowCams.

Depending on how much of the actual render is covered in the viewing angle of the each light's ShadowCam, (the view from which each shadowmap is actually generated) some, or even most of the pixels in the shadowmap may fall outside the view of the rendering camera and may not be utilized in the actual render.

A 8000x8000 pixel shadowmap generated from a shadowcam that is viewing a field that is 8 times larger than the scene being rendered will yield the same shadows as a 1000x1000 pixel map that is generated from a shadowcam that is viewing only the portion of the scene being rendered. The same number of pixels will be used and the rest disregarded.

The point being that maps of vastly different sizes can produce identical results depending on the shadowcam field of view. If you only adjust the map size without addressing the shadowcams' views, you may be wasting huge amouts of memory & render time on calculating shadowmap pixels that will not affect the render.

(gotta do a tute with pics.....one of these days.)

Model & Texture: BodyMorpher, (12NotHappy face pose ?) with it's standard texture P4NG5v5mk2. (camera focus 100) Download them here: http://home.online.no/~kjellil/Index-AllStuff.htm Jpeg: Saved as tiff, converted in SmartSaver to jpeg. 75% filter 211 or 422 if i remember correctly. The image does not have many sharp contrasts, so that's why its small and good. Shadows: Sharp shadows are good for spotlights and dramatic effects, but i would really want a edge blur effect :) As Nace says its more to it than this... and there are many problems with shadowmaps that no increase in rez can fix. Anyway it look like 3000 - 6000 is a good range to use when you want sharper shadows. Maybe i should upload and image to show what it could be used for.