I apologize for the DAZ 101 type question, but here goes anyway. If there's a better place, mods please feel free to move it. I'm following one of the tutorials in the DAZ manual, about lighting. It says to click on the button to turn shadows on. I don't seem to have that button. I have a button to turn illumination on or off. But regarding shadows, all I see is a button that can set the shadows to "none", "deep shadow map" or "raytraced". Can someone tell me what those options mean/do and which is best to use in which situations? Thanks in advance Jayne

Hi Jayne,

The latest version of studio changed the lighting options to what you see. I don't think the manual has been updated yet.

Deep shadow map creates the shadows before the render begins while raytraced shadows are produced during the render. Raytracing seems to take longer at times but I find it generally produces better looking shadows.

Mark

Thanks for the response Mark.  Thought I was going crazy there for a second.

I did notice that raytracing took longer -- it created the shadow map before it commenced with the render. 

I'll have to try it both ways and see what sort of difference there is.

Shadow map is the old way, what you would have had with the cast shadows button in the manual. It divides the scene up into cells and decides if illumination from the light is getting there or not, which is what the pre-calculation is figuring out, then it illuminates accordingly during the render: that makes it faster, but it can be error prone (especially in large scenes it will decide that a lit surface is actually shaded) and the shadows have limited resolution.

Ray tracing follows a line of sight from each light to the current surface, checking to see how much light gets there: that makes it more accurate, but involves far more calculations (and its very accuracy can produce harsh shadows). The quality depends on how many samples it takes per pixel - too few and the result is speckled, too many and the speed will be unacceptable.

The more I learn about 3D graphics, the more amazing it seems to me.  Thanks for the explanation :)