Nance opened this issue on Oct 11, 2002 ยท 9 posts
Ajax posted Fri, 11 October 2002 at 3:51 AM
Thanks Nance. This is the first time I've heard of this too. It makes perfect sense though. However, I mostly use infinite lights (I confess to being hopeless at lighting) and the story there doesn't seem to be quite the same. Poser adjusts the shadow light cam for infinite lights so that all shadow casting objects in the scene fit completely within the field of view. That's why Spanki's trick of turning off shadow casting for the ground plane works. At render time, Poser readjusts the field of view to include all objects for which shadow casting is turned on and only those objects, zeroing in on the figure in his example. That means that if you use infinite lights for shadow casting, your options seem to be: 1) turning off shadow casting for anything that doesn't need it or won't be seen in your render 2) increasing the shadow map size 3) waiting until you're absolutely sure you aren't going to add anything to or delete anything from the scene and then fiddling with the shadow light cam settings, being careful to keep in view the particular parts of things that you need to cast shadows for your render. Since the cam has already adjusted it's field of view to only include those things that are set to cast shadows, the gains from number 3 will usually not be large ones. Personally, I'd go with a combo of the first two in almost every infinite light situation. I would find it very difficult to try to guage, while viewing through the shadow light cam, which bits of things are going to have their shadows visible in the view where I plan to render.
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