in p4, i have a clothing item that loads and renders fine till i conform it to the figure (v3) then the render shadows turn really ugly, distorted and messed up, even when the pose is still in zeroed state (the pose it got modelled in.) run across this before??? tia :)

I seem to remember something about setting the pose to 0.001 or something to avoid deformations, but I can't tell you exactly what it was I read. Sorry. mac

heyas; that's setting the body part twist to .001 to remove that weird flipping out twisting you get as you pose it. but this isn't being posed. did you say the shadows, april??? do you have like a befor and after picture? and i swear this sounds familiar... did you ask this a while back?

i only realised it last night when i tried to render after conforming. 8O so i haven't asked it before, hoping someone else had! misery loves company ;) -- i tried a search but searching for "conform shadow", "conform" and "ugly shadow" didn't turn anything up lol it goes away if i set shadowmap size 1024 (and i only have 1 global light that casts shadows, two other globals are present but don't cast shadows)... but what gets me is that it renders just fine at shadowmap 250 before it is conformed!!! like if i stood the clothing item against v3, renders fine. conform to figure, renders crap. huh??? i thought, is it the proximity to v3's polys? i set the clothing body scale to 103% to make the whole of it bigger and presumably further away from v3's polys and still it rendered the same, icky. i've also tried triangulating the polys, and increasing the poly count to 2 times (without trangulating)... all same results (though i expected even crappier results with the triangulated version... it didn't get worse, it wasn't better either though.) i'll post a before and after tonight when i'm at home. thanks for the replies :D

must be due to the late hour last night... i conducted my test again, as above, and this time i figured it IS cos of v3's shadows interfering with the clothing shadows. the reason it didn't happen before conforming is cos the clothing lands sufficiently far enough in front of v3 so the shadow interferance didn't happen. duh... sigh so the solution is to increase shadow map size, 500 was good enough. or turn off cast shadows for vicki's body parts that are causing it. etc... sorry it wasn't such a "what the" afterall. :|

heyas; no, that was pretty cool. you can get some weird things going on when the shadow map is too small and the light is too far away from something (or the something is too far away from the other thing you want it to cast shadows on). i think it was dodger and/or mac who were casting a light straight down on a box and it couldn't cast a shadow on the ground plane.... it's good to know, in any case. :)