Which shadow is better? Ray Trace or Depth? For light I have two options for shadows. I was curious if one looks better than the other?

In my experience, Depth works better in Poser 4 rendering but with firefly, Ray Trace looks better.

It really depends on what you want to accomplish - and what your scene is like.

If we're not talking HUGE scenes, you could probably use adepth mapped shadow with no ill effects. Just remember th crank up the shadow map to at least 1024...

Depth mapped shadows are what's causing the notorious Glowing Nostrlis™ - you're quit of those with raytraced shadows.

The downside of raytraces shadows is that they're harder than depthmapped shadows, and if we're not talking a bright, sunny picture, they MAY look odd. IMO they're the bestest, I'm a sucker for anything raytraced, but your mileage may vary...

Oh.. on large scenes, the shadow map gets too small almost no matter what you set it to, so in that case, if you want shadows, you'll need raytraced ones.

I'm a huge fan of the depth mapped shadows, but that's a personal thing since I try to use raytracing as infrequently as possible for speed reasons - almost exclusively for refractions, AO and some reflections.

You can use depth mapped shadows on large scenes if (viewing through the light) you can see the entire scene and the resolution is cranked up, greater than 1024 as mentioned. Depth mapped shadows can never be transparent or transmit colors the way raytraced shadows can.

You can "blurrier" raytrace shadows if you increase the number of samples but prepared to take a hit.

If speed ain't your concern and you want no-compromise quality, Raytrace is the way to go. And I'll take the Pepsi challenge with anyone on that. I have experimented extensively with Depth Mapped shadows and they just don't cut it in terms of accuracy or quality, no matter what you do.

Far as rendering in P4 is concerned, there is only depth mapped, so it ain't much of a decision.

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Thanks for the feedback guys. This is good info.

Depth mapped shadows are fundamentally flawed, regardless of what application you're using for rendering, in that they don't blur realistically. This isn't really Poser's fault, it is just as wrong in other rendering applications. You can hide this in many cases depending on how the scene is lit, but at times it becomes very obvious. There is no setting that will give you realistic blurred depthmapped shadows.

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A single light with the same position and brightness, but with blurred raytraced shadows, is more realistic in general form of the shadow, but because of the way Poser renders blurred raytraced shadows from a single light, the blurred part looks rather dirty (not enough samples)...

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However with FIVE lights, each at 20% brightness, and with a little bit of manual spreading around, we get a really quite decent, semi realistic blurred shadow.

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And this is how the scene is set up ... all 5 lights are set to Point At the square in this example, with a little bit of moving around so they spread their shadow a bit more than they would if they were all at exactly the same position.

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I dunno, during a fast moving motion blurred animation I think depth maps can hold their own. Feature films from Pixar / ILM didn't begin using raytrace shadows or AO until a few years ago.

Quote - I dunno, during a fast moving motion blurred animation I think depth maps can hold their own. Feature films from Pixar / ILM didn't begin using raytrace shadows or AO until a few years ago.

Ah, but that's something different entirely. You can get away with a lot of approximating, low-rezing and outright cheating when movement is involved.

Motion blur and the way the human brain processes movement, keyframing in some situations (the brain filling in the blanks of what literally isn't there) means things that are taken for granted in even a fairly amateurish still image are very much overkill in motion, wasting processor time and creation time.

Look at fast-moving games, like the newer FPS's. Gorgeous graphics but the moment you stop moving and take a look around at still objects the unreality is blatantly obvious.

Quote -
Motion blur and the way the human brain processes movement, keyframing in some situations (the brain filling in the blanks of what literally isn't there) means things that are taken for granted in even a fairly amateurish still image are very much overkill in motion, wasting processor time and creation time.

I'm not sure I follow you. Please clarify.

Well for one pixar dont do humans or hyperreal stuff. They do stylised work where character and animation are given priority over making things look photoreal. That way they are able to get away with lots of cheats since the viewer expects a toonish look in the first place. Plus PRMan didnt even have raytracing till a few years back so its not as if they had the option to use raytracing.

Also to add to Keith's post, in animation renders the single most important point with lighting/shadows is consistency. ie your lighting quality should not change from frame to frame. If you can manage this, the human eye will just outright ignore any defects in the lighting itself (as the viewer would be too busy looking at the motion instead) Of course you do need a minimum level of quality, but the level is much lower then say if you were doing a still render of people or architecture, where the eye would be free to roam around and pick at various issues. And of course moblur also hides a lot of artifacts.

Pixar does not make realistic movies. Their style does not need physical accurate shadows, just shadows which work in a movie. They use ray tracing and AO as rarely as possible, since this stuff costs much more render time - and rendertime is expensive. If an effect needs rendertime (remember Sully's fur in Monster's Inc?) they just do it and spend time and money, but only if the effect is worth it. Realistic shadows and lighting would not be that much obvious when you make toon stuff, so don't expect them to spend their money there. Pixars Renderman couldn't even do ray tracing for quite a while.

If I would do a movie with poser, I would try to use the P4 renderer wherever possible, because it's faster. If it's not possible I would avoid ray tracing and AO, just to shorten render times. I would use any trick I know to make scenes simpler, use pre-rendered backgrounds wherever possible, Stuff like that. The main characters would get the render time they need, but not more. And that's exactly what pixar does - spend a lot of render time for your main effects, but save it up everywhere else.

But if you want to make stills and/or need the quality, go for ray traced shadows and AO. You will need it.

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And what about ILM? They are certainly not known for doing hyper-real characters and they are not using the same tools as Pixar.

I'm not saying depth mapped shadows are for every situation but I think their merit is under valued.

ILM also use PRMan as their main renderer (they only added mentalray when they had to do Star Wars episode 1) Which means that till recently they also had no choice but to use depth maps as their was no way to do raytracing fast enough. But since they did add mentalray, PRMan finally got raytracing and hardware got cheap enough, they now use it in a lot of their work.

Anyway i'm not disagreeing with you, if used correctly depth mapped shadows are fast and effective. They are particularly good in animation because they show none of the artifacts that soft raytraced shadows can, like blotchiness or noise etc. But for the majority of poser work, which consists of stills, they aren't that great.

But heck i'd be happy if more poser work used any kind of shadows at all :)

"And this is how the scene is set up ... all 5 lights are set to Point At the square in this example, with a little bit of moving around so they spread their shadow a bit more than they would if they were all at exactly the same position". Nice detectivework, pjz99. I did a smaller version in P5 to deal with the lack of blur. You must split the shadows too, no?

Use what works for you. If you like depth mapped shadows, by all means, use them. I use them as well sometimes - mainly because they render faster. When working on the materials I always use them, because they can be cached. But I generally prefer ray traced shadows, and AO.

IMHO ILM uses Photorealistic Renderman for image generation as well, so they will have to make similar decisions. There are only a few renderers which are fast and reliable enough for movie production. Nearly all Hollywood productions were done with PRenderman, Mental Ray and Lightwave, at least that were true some years ago.

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Sorry, my tone was way out of line. I think each of the three methods (though AO is not a true shadow) has merits. I agree that raytrace shadows are awesome and versatile. I don't think that they're the "end all, be all" shadow types, and should be evaluated on a shot by shot or project by project basis.

Before PRman had raytracing, those functions would be carried out by BMRT though very sophisticated message passing, but it was only used when absolutely crucial to the shot. Also I believe ILM uses mental ray not because of raytracing but due to certain PRman limitations such as rendering dielectrics very close to the camera, etc.

Quote - Nice detectivework, pjz99. I did a smaller version in P5 to deal with the lack of blur. You must split the shadows too, no?

How do you mean?

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Quote - "Nice detectivework, pjz99. I did a smaller version in P5 to deal with the lack of blur. You must split the shadows too, no?" How do you mean?" I mean do you set all your 5 lights shadows to 0.200? Or some reduction..? Sometimes black can get too black...

Wow....great thread for this beginner in rendering. Thanks for all the info! I love this place. :)

> Quote - I mean do you set all your 5 lights shadows to 0.200? Or some reduction..? Sometimes black can get too black...

No, all the shadow values are 1.0. If you want the black area to be non-black, then 1 fill light will suffice. Black is simply 0/0/0 color; stacking 50 shadows onto a surface won't make it any more black. You do want to turn the brightness down though; 5 100% lights pointed at the subject will be too much light.

I had to recreate the scene since I didn't save it, but this is pretty close. There is one fill light at 35% off to the right (spotlight again). Also gave the ground plane a bit of displacement texture to make it more obvious what's going on.

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... and the setup. For convenience when working with a cluster of lights, you can make them children of some prop, and just move the prop around; all the spots will smoothly Point At the target as you move the handle prop around the scene (that's what the ball behind the light cluster is for).

ps: the fill light is set to cast no shadow, white color, 35% brightness.

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Guess I'm missing something. How do you reduce your shadows?

With a fill light. Do you see the single light above the camera?

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yep, as Bantha says...

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pjz99 that is a really creative solution for raytraced blurred soft shadows. Thanks for sharing.

A few notes in general: for an animation you are always shooting for fast render time per frame, so exploring low settings is a frequent strategy. But with depth map shadows, beware the famous "flicker" effect at low settings and close up.

If you have any dynamic hair in the scene and want raytrace shadows, you are facing gigantic rendertime hits unless you turn off "visible to raytrace" for the hair. But if you turn off raytrace on hair your hair will not be casting shadows. What to do, what to do. Either live without shadows from hair or throw in a depth mapped light just to cast shadows from hair. Or...accept the hit.

I highly doubt that the P4 render engine is faster that Firefly....for the same effect in the scene.

I've been playing with raytrace in Carrara 6Pro, which has soft options. It works pretty well, but I found to get the really soft you have to multiply your lights and keep the settings of each low.

I am going to carry pjz idea of clustering multiple lights with only a small position difference into my Carrara trials.

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Quote - If you have any dynamic hair in the scene and want raytrace shadows, you are facing gigantic rendertime hits unless you turn off "visible to raytrace" for the hair. But if you turn off raytrace on hair your hair will not be casting shadows. What to do, what to do. Either live without shadows from hair or throw in a depth mapped light just to cast shadows from hair. Or...accept the hit.

This is another great flaw of Poser, that you cannot set a light to only affect a selection of objects in a scene, or to ignore certain objects. What I'd suggest for dynamic hair (and how it's done in other apps e.g. Cinema) is to have one or more specific light(s) affect hair, and other practical lights ignore it. In Poser, all lights have a global effect for the entire scene, unless there is some trickery that can be done with materials to link a given surface with a particular light (I don't think there is).

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Quote - > Quote -

Motion blur and the way the human brain processes movement, keyframing in some situations (the brain filling in the blanks of what literally isn't there) means things that are taken for granted in even a fairly amateurish still image are very much overkill in motion, wasting processor time and creation time.

I'm not sure I follow you. Please clarify.

Okay. Imagine a 4 frame animation. Frame 1 is a person with the arm stuck straight out, Frame 2 is the person with the sticking at a 45 degree angle up, Frame 3 has the arm straight up, Frame 4 is a copy of Frame 2.

Play those those 4 frames in a loop and the human brain sees someone waving their arm, filling in the motion required to get between those images. You're not actually seeing the arm move at all.

Now assume that the motion being shown takes up a single second. Use 30 frames to cover the movement. In order to show a true representation of that movement, more detail and accuracy, you need more frames. Say you shoot at 300 frames per second. By definition, you've got 10 times the detail. You have by far a more accurate depiction of the movement because you can see more detail on the exact arm position at a given time, see things like how the motion through the air affects the way the sleeve moves, the way the shadows being cast move. Go to 3000 frames per second and it's more accurate still.

If you just want to show someone waving their arm at normal speed, it's also a complete waste of time. All that detail is wasted because 30 frames per second is entirely adequate to show an arm moving in what looks like a lifelike and smooth way. Adding 10 times or 100 times the detail doesn't help in the least because people simply won't see it. Your shadows don't have to be accurate because they move too fast for people to make out details.

Instead of a person waving, imagine a person running. The shadow on the ground while they are moving could be an indistinct blob without much definition and it won't bother people because they don't expect to make out the details anyway. Going to all the trouble to make the shadow accurate, or reflections or highlights, is a waste of time for the same reason that shooting at 300 or 3000 FPS (and not for special effects) is a waste of time. As long as things are consistent (lighting is coming from the same way, that sort of thing), humans are much more forgiving of lower accuracy.

On the other hand, if you want to do a render of a single instant of that movement, freezing it in place, then you do need that detail. You can't cheat nearly as much because for a still image people will see that the shadow is wrong and won't accept an indistinct blob if there should clearly be a defined shadow.

To put it in terms of special effects, although having a film of a giant monster eating New York City is harder than rendering a single image of a giant monster eating New York City, it's easier to make the film look more realistic than a single image. With the image you have to get the shadows all accurate, the lighting all accurate, the distance and colours accurate otherwise people will be able to pick out the inconsistencies that make it clear it's a fake. In the film, people don't have the time to pick out those problems so the SFX artists don't have to waste their time on making it perfect.

yep, as Bantha says..." I see now. I just do it differently. Here's one shadow casting light set to 0.400. Almost seems too much. An ibl and a "high"light. AO does the rest. Skin is the acid test for me. Good thread

@Keith - Ah, you articulated what I was thinking.

richardson, could you possibly post that light set for me to look at :)**
**

2 spots and an infinite. Not much to look at...

I don't think you have enough objects in the scene, or the appropriate composition, to make shadows all that noticeable. You could get (possibly ARE GETTING) most of your shadow effects from AO, certainly the shadow line under the arm appears to be material based AO. I'd expect to see more shadow cast by her body on the object she's leaning against, whether from the foreground light or the very strong rim light in the background.

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Quote - > Quote - If you have any dynamic hair in the scene and want raytrace shadows, you are facing gigantic rendertime hits unless you turn off "visible to raytrace" for the hair. But if you turn off raytrace on hair your hair will not be casting shadows. What to do, what to do. Either live without shadows from hair or throw in a depth mapped light just to cast shadows from hair. Or...accept the hit.

This is another great flaw of Poser, that you cannot set a light to only affect a selection of objects in a scene, or to ignore certain objects. What I'd suggest for dynamic hair (and how it's done in other apps e.g. Cinema) is to have one or more specific light(s) affect hair, and other practical lights ignore it. In Poser, all lights have a global effect for the entire scene, unless there is some trickery that can be done with materials to link a given surface with a particular light (I don't think there is).

this is an old thread but i had to writte what i think.
i have been readin some PIXAR papers. and pixars renderman doesnt use raytraced shadows for hair.
they created special shadows for hair and for clouds, and dust called ''deep shadows''. they are faster. with hair and dust and clouds you dont need details in the shadows. because dust and clouds alreeady blur the shadows.

i agree. it would be amazing if we could use one light only for a specific prop or hair. but it wont happen.

on the 5 lights system. i am also using this. i am praying that poser 8 will have an area light. but i am afraid that if SM will create this light the rendertime will be the same like using 5 lights. this wouldnt change anything. right?
i hope in poser 8 we will be able to make fast soft shadows.

about ILM. ILM started using AO and raytraced shadows in the movie Pearl Harbor. about pixar movies. pixar is sometimes using 100 lights in one enviorment. i think they dont notice the bad depth shadow maps because 100 lights hides this.

pjz99 how much blur did you use on those 5 lights. 10?

Quote - i agree. it would be amazing if we could use one light only for a specific prop or hair. but it wont happen.

This feature is a lot more important then you realize. Generally speaking, depth mapped shadows are not a bad shadow type, it's just that they are crippled in firefly. DM shadows work best when you can do selective lighting, making each light affect only those objects that you want and ignore everything else. This way you can do shadow-only lights and get them nice and tight on each shadow caster, which gives you good results even with depth maps. But of course this is impossible in firefly so we get all these issues with DM shadows.

Also note that deep shadows are actually a modified form of DM shadows, one that takes into account transparency in the depth map and can thus be used to do nice translucent shadows on things like hair, clouds etc But this also requires that you be able to do shadow lights for the hair. Otherwise you get all the same artifacts.

i agree.
i think poser writting is to old to add all of this inside. i am reading that the new blender 2.5 will not have a lot of new features. 2.5 will be a rewritte for blender.

Quote - > Quote - i agree. it would be amazing if we could use one light only for a specific prop or hair. but it wont happen.

Generally speaking, depth mapped shadows are not a bad shadow type, it's just that they are crippled in firefly.

so DM shadows in other softwares are better? they are bad only in poser?

I personally prefer the look of mapped shadows , but for light through foliage , like long grass the raytraced shadows work better. Setting a high enough map size and ensuring it covers only the rendered area is important to godd quality mapped shadows. I think its a bit subjective too.

Attached Link: http://www.cs.ucy.ac.cy/ayia-napa06/presentations/ayianapa06per.ppt

They are much better in Photorealistic Renderman, which is what Pixar uses. I have no idea if they even exist in real ray tracers, like Mental Ray or vRay. Vue Studio has depth mapped shadows, I think they can be linked to single items.

Ray traced shadows are usually much easier to set up in an realistic environment. Pixar uses DM shadows a lot, but acording to some papers they published they use hundreds of lights in a single scene.

Take a look at the linked PPT presentation - Pixar explains why they used Ray tracing in "Cars". Some nice details inside.

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Sail out to sea and do new things.
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Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

Well.

I haven't been around long enough to know the limitations of Poser and render engines generally.

What is clear to me is that in real life, there is no such thing as a light that only affects certain things (e.g. hair). If one cannot get the right effect from lighting that has global effect, that tells me that something else is wrong, and I'd much rather have that fixed than see lights that can be specified to only affect particular objects in the scene.

FWIW.

______________

Hardware: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X/MSI MAG570 Tomahawk X570/Zotac Geforce GTX 1650 Super 4GB/32GB OLOy RAM

Software: Windows 10 Professional/Poser Pro 11/Photoshop/Postworkshop 3

This is the typical lighting setup I use lately:
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/rrfilelock/download.php?fileid=33527&key=8122

The constraints that Pixar works under have zero to do with a single user producing stills (95% of Poser use). Feature length film productions prefer depth-mapped shadows because they render quicker than raytraced by a big margin, not because they're of higher quality. When you have to render 30 frames per second, times 60 seconds, times 90 minutes for a typical feature film, rendering even 10% faster can mean a tremendous cost savings. In stills, depth mapped shadows will pretty much always be of inferior quality - and while they do render faster, for your typical still frame image that's largely unimportant.

If image quality is less valuable to you than render time, then depth mapped shadows may be what you want ^^

Quote - If one cannot get the right effect from lighting that has global effect, that tells me that something else is wrong, and I'd much rather have that fixed than see lights that can be specified to only affect particular objects in the scene.

That's the problem, Poser can't do lighting that has a real global effect (global illumination). It behaves in a way that is fundamentally NOT realistic, and this limitation has to be worked around with many fill lights and other tricks - which create problems of their own, since you may not want a character casting shadows in three or four different directions e.g.

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Please note, the lighting setup I'm showing there is not all that realistic, but I feel it's a huge improvement over the typical Poser light setup. YMMV.

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Quote - What is clear to me is that in real life, there is no such thing as a light that only affects certain things (e.g. hair). If one cannot get the right effect from lighting that has global effect, that tells me that something else is wrong, and I'd much rather have that fixed than see lights that can be specified to only affect particular objects in the scene.

If you want to compare to real life, then you only have to look at studio photography where they also do selective lighting. Of course they cant get as precise control as in CG, but they use things like gobos/barndoors, bounce cards, light diffusers and precise control of intensity to make sure that light behaves exactly how they want it to.

As CG artists, we do much the same thing, only our tools are much more 'fake' so we compensate with equally 'fake' techniques.

Quote - I have no idea if they even exist in real ray tracers, like Mental Ray or vRay.

mentalray has them, as well as deep shadows (called volumic shadows in it) Dont know about VRay.

yeah some people dont even know how many trick they use to light a set.
the actor doesnt just stand on the street and is light by the sun. the lighting is so complex like you would build it in a computer.

for example watch CSI miami. this is not realistic lighting he he :)

i know that raytraced shadows are more accurate. i know that depth mapped shadows are never perfect.

but today just for the sake of it i wanted to make sharp shadows with DM shadows. i have poser pro. i did have poser 7.
this is the result that i got. its a spot light. shadows size is 1024,blur 5 and bias 0,1.

there is no shadow around the neck. making the bias lower doesnt make it better. making the shadow map bigger also doesnt make it better.

i actually dont remember this in poser 7. so did the DM shadows got worse in poser 8?

I tried to make a similar render. I have problems with the light in this position both with RT and DM shadows. Wierd.

I don't have time to test more. This is very strange.

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Depth-mapped shadows. Very wrong.

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Ray-traced shadows. Also wrong, but wrong in a different way.

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you know i accept that poser is not maya or 3ds studio max. i didnt even use maye to test it.

but i think there is a line .......and that kind of shadows dont belong in a 3d software in 2009.

Poser's big problem with using Depth Mapped is the fact that Poser uses such a tiny scale. And the most well-known case is the glowing nostrils.
Why does scale have anything to do with it, you ask? Well, since Poser is using 3D objects at an extremely tiny scale (far smaller than almost any other 3D app), the distance between objects is miniscule. It doesn't look that way in Poser - since everything in Poser is tiny together.

The tiny scale and the tiny distances mean that the space between two objects, where one is meant to throw a shadow on the other, may be too small and it become impossible to calculate a shadow.

If a figure stands on the floor, there's no problem casting a shadow on the floor, it's sufficiently far away. But if for instance a sitting character has a hand resting on his/her leg, Poser will not be able to create the shadow of each finger on the leg, just a tiny distance away, using depth mapped. As you gradually lift the hand, at a certain point suddenly Poser can calculate a shadoww.
With Ray Trace this limitation is not present.
So: for realistic shadows at very close quarters - Depth Mapped simply can't do it.
Glowing nostrils - the front end of the nose is too close to the back of the nose. Give the person a HUGE nose and your problem is solved! LOL
:] Fish

FishNose,

I thought nostril glow was because people use 256 pixels shadow maps and don't bother adjusting the shadow min bias to be smaller than the size of a human nostril diameter. (It defaults to 1 inch). And they don't know anything about managing shadow cameras.

But you say here that Depth Mapped simply can't do it. Hmmm. It must be true, then.

But I was sure I wrote a thread 3 years ago showing everybody how to get sharp small-scale shadows from DM shadows with a couple simple adjustments to their technique.

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2577132

I guess the instructions there don't work since, as you say, Depth Mapped simply can't do it.

Also I heard that the internal scale of Poser was modified since Poser 7, that when Poser sends the data to Firefly everything is scaled up. And that the reason for doing so had nothing to do with depth-mapped shadows. It was because of ray-tracing, numerical problems. But I could be misinformed on that issue as well.

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Thanks for all the sarcasm. Just what I need, isn't it. I wrote what I've been told before. assuming it to be correct. A mistake, wasn't it.
I won't waste your time again, now will I.
:] Fish

Sorry FishNose. I should have put smilies. I was attempting good-natured ribbing. ;-)

Your post was perfectly phrased to get my sarcasm circuit fired up. Posting Poser issues you've heard about as unassailable certainties, without testing them or asking for any other opinions on how they can be dealt with is sure to get a little crap from me.

If you concur with a problem, it would be better in the future to phrase it like this:

I've heard that you can't get fingers to cast a DM shadow on a leg unless you raise the fingers. Is there a setting to deal with this?

And I would have said: Sure - decrease your shadow min bias.

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Also, if I had said "You are misinformed" instead of "I could be misinformed", I don't think things would have gone any better. But that is what I meant.

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its true that in poser everything is smaller .if you load an object or a figure into blender its very very verry small.
for Zbrush they needed to make a script to scale it up. because you coudlnt use it inside.

Quote - its true that in poser everything is smaller .if you load an object or a figure into blender its very very verry small.
for Zbrush they needed to make a script to scale it up. because you coudlnt use it inside.

We've discussed that before, though. The OBJ file format does not specify units and you can't embed them in any way to make it self-describing so it can be transported from one application to another. Suppose you find a value in the file, for example 7.28. What does that mean? 7.28 feet, meters, millimeters, inches, miles, furlongs? There's no way to know.

Each application has to either just pick a unit, or has to ask you to specify how big you want the imported object to be. Poser did the latter, although the mechanism (percent of standard figure height) was a pretty stupid choice. If you do not enable import scaling, then the assumption is 1 OBJ unit = 1 Poser Native Unit = about 100 inches. Some applications standardized the OBJ unit = 1 meter, about 39 inches. I hardly think that the difference between 100 and 39 (a factor of about 2.5) is particularly scary to deal with.

Moreover, these unit choices don't affect anything in the render.

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has this something to do with shadow map ? shadow map size 1024 and bias 0.

please dont tell me to go to 2048 because thats crazy he he :). there should be a shadow around the neck.

shouldnt there be a shadow with a map size 256 only blured ?

2048 is crazy? It depends. What is your shadow map trying to include?

When people build a whole city and try to render a few feet around a figure in the middle of the city, even 2048 is not enough. At that resolution, the entire figure is recorded in only a few pixels of the shadow map.

To determine what a 256 pixel wide shadow map can see, you have to render through the shadow cam at 256 pixels. I don't have time to try it, but you could. Select your shadow camera as the render camera and set your render dimension to 256 by 256. What do you get. Zoom in and see how some pixels have to share info both from the head and from the neck. In such cases, where is the occlusion point for that shadow map pixel - the head or the neck? It can't be both. You only get one depth value per pixel.

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bagginsbill did i writte that i have something around my figure ?

i have only a figure. i even turned down my ground . so only the figure. so yes 2048 would be crazy to make a shadow around the neck. i even used a spot light.

i am doing tests now with calibrating the shadow cam but i get the same results.

Here's what I get in P7 using ice-boy's settings for his spot light in his first post about this issue. First with M4 - Notice using RT shadows I don't get anywhere near the same pronounced issues as bb. P7 doesn't have gamma correction at render time, but there is still material based GC - I wonder if GC accentuates the issue in Poser Pro (?). P7's implementation of DM shadows does seem clunky though, especially with lights angled like this.

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Now with Apollo.

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but you see around the neck? how the shadow is missing? i get this with james and apollo .

i dont understand why this is happening since the shadow cam is not seeing that part of the neck.

could it be because the polygon count is to high for the shadows?

Fascinating. Thanks for the renders, Dan. Your Apollo has the same "necklace" that ice-boy showed us. Looks like P7 and PPro are very similar, so it's probably not a unique problem to Poser Pro.

ice-boy - This looks like a bug. The necklace is impossible to be from shadow map resolution - it is well within the area that is in deep shadow - it's not marginal at all.

I do think that GC reveals the problem much more strongly, but I suspect it has been there all along.

My "Riddick" render has lighting similar to this, although there was IBL involved as well, and no GC. Have a look:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=1470441

Back then (June 2007) I think I was only using DM shadows at the time. My Riddick shows some "necklace" lighting effect. He has bulging neck muscles, though, so we'd expect some variation in diffuse reflection there. But perhaps not that much? I'm willing to believe that was showing the problem - it may be that if I'd only used the spotlight in that render, I would have noticed a big issue.

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Quote - but you see around the neck? how the shadow is missing? i get this with james and apollo .

i dont understand why this is happening since the shadow cam is not seeing that part of the neck.

could it be because the polygon count is to high for the shadows?

Poly count seems unlikely as other more detailed areas don't display this issue.
The angle you position the light at appears to make a difference.
I thought at first there might be some relation to body-part groups and while on the Apollo renders it seems the issue occurs directly at the neck/chest seam, when I imported a welded Apollo model it rendered identically (when using DM shadows).

I have no idea really. I mostly use RT shadows which are working fine in P7 (SR3) from what I can see.

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carodan i also use a lot of RT shadows. some people like to use DB shadows for animation. they are fast. and they are practical for fill and bounce lighting.i am not very smart when it comes to software but i am now searching on google some papers if there is something. i dont know maybe.

DM shadows in poser are generated like in maya,blender and,..... it has a shadow cam.

very interesting.

Yeah, DM shadows are good to have in the arsenal. I suspect bb is right on the bug call - I've tinkered all afternoon on this and just can't shift that "necklace" effect.

bb - curious about the fact that you had the same issue with RT shadows in Poser Pro. Is that for real?

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i did some tests by calibrating the shadow cam. this is no change on the shadow cam.

here i zoomed on the head and neck. but there is still a ''leak''

Quote - Yeah, DM shadows are good to have in the arsenal. I suspect bb is right on the bug call - I've tinkered all afternoon on this and just can't shift that "necklace" effect.

bb - curious about the fact that you had the same issue with RT shadows in Poser Pro. Is that for real?

I don't get a necklace - light leaking into deep shadow - in that RT render I posted. However, we see some strangeness on the hip/thigh area. I'm not sure that effect is fully qualified as a "bug". I think that case has more to do with numerical accuracy with regard to the angle of incidence.

For diffuse reflection the AOI is the only driver, and reflected luminance is entirely based on the cosine of the AOI. The slope of the cosine function near 90 degrees AOI is at its maximum there. The result is the luminance changes most rapidly exactly at the terminator.

Now it just so happens that there is a disagreement about luminance between GC(2.2) and sRGB. The slope of luminance changes are different at the very low end. Thusly, you would get a more pronounced rapid rise in near-terminator luminance from GC than is realistic. There has been some discussion of this phenomenon, and frankly I'm convinced that GC(2.2) is naive and should not actually be used if you're dealing with these marginal luminance situations. Coupled with the rapid increase of diffuse reflection near the terminator, we get a rather obvious departure from realism.

To fix it, we'd have to switch to using sRGB conversion instead of GC(2.2). GC is strictly a power function, whereas sRGB is part linear, part power, and has to be fitted together with quite a few more nodes. It's worth it when you get into these large, barely lit areas. Poser PRO should have implemented sRGB as an option, instead of just GC. With shader-based conversion, sRGB is possible, but way to esoteric for most people. Heck, there are still thousands of users who insist I'm full of crap on this topic and they don't need to use GC.

It's very similar to a long-running debate at dpreview.com about the impact on image quality associated with the use of filters. The Pros insist that even a $300 filter is off limits as it compromises image quality. The hobbyists claim they can't tell the difference. The debate is endless.

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i dont think this is happening because of GC

On the subject of gamma correction, one thing I've noticed (particularly in these bright but single light renders that arn't using IBL) is that the material based GC creates sharp lines where the lit areas of body-parts end and unlit areas begin - in other words, the transition of light into shadow is rather harsh. Is this also related to the GC method, or something else?

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but even without GC it looks the same.

This really belongs in the VSS thread, but since we're here...

First of two comparisons - VSS PR3 with gamma 2.2. In the top image I've circled an area which typically looks overly harsh to my eyes. The lower of the two images is a version of the same render in which I've softened the transitional areas and overlayed them over the original.

It's a minor thing in many respects, and one which really only bugs me in these more contrasted lighting setups. In lighter conditions with full IBL the skin works beautifully.

I have no idea how this could be fixed in the shaders (or even if it warrants the change).

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In this next comparison the top image is the VSS PR3 with gamma at 1.0. Obviously a darker render. Beneath I've done a Photoshop levels adjusted version (what I usually did before GC was around). This has, as we know, resulted in much brighter "blooms" of light on the top of the head and shoulders, but the transition into the shadow regions is much smoother. I included the Gamma 2.2 version at the bottom to further compare.

I don't know. Maybe it's just a personal preference.
To me it seems that the material based GC is creating a harsher transition between light and shadow across the model surface.

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i think lighting like this never happens in real life. to light an object 100% without any global illumination. thats why it looks strange.

have you tryed with the inverse square shaders?

Dan - the transition at the terminator is what I was talking about. It doesn't fade realistically because the GC function is not actually what your monitor is doing. The monitor is following a more complex response curve, called sRGB. .Anything near black is very different between GC and sRGB.

I had a very interesting discussion about this with cobaltdream, who is driven nuts by this phenomenon.

It happened in the artistic lens thread. You want to jump into it here on page 5:

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2754029&page=5#message_3404764

Read through to page 6 where Stefan says I'm a maniac and then I ask him if sRGB will be in Poser 8.

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I'm at work right now but when I get home I'll try an experiment.

I have a Nikon D90 SLR and an SB-600 speed flash. The flash unit can be detached from the camera and set up on a stand anywhere I want. I can program the camera's built-in flash in commander mode to fire the detached flash only. I'll try some photographs in a pitch dark room (have to wait for the sun to go down completely) with that setup. I could try in a bathroom but the bounce light from nearby surfaces would spoil the exxperiment. I should be able to get a pretty good approximation to a point light in a larger room where there are no surfaces near the flash or the subject.

As to the subject, I wish I had a simple white ball but I don't. I'll try to find something similar. Maybe I have a can of something that I can use as a cylinder prop and wrap a piece of white paper around it. Then we can compare the light response to a Poser cylinder and see what the terminator looks like.

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Quote - Dan - the transition at the terminator is what I was talking about. It doesn't fade realistically because the GC function is not actually what your monitor is doing. The monitor is following a more complex response curve, called sRGB. .Anything near black is very different between GC and sRGB.

Thanks bb - phew! I'm just not up on all the terminology. Yes, the transition at the terminator is what I'm having difficulty with.
I was remembering some flash-lit photos of friends in the countryside at night I took years ago - no moon or light pollution of any kind. The forms were crisp but the transitions in places were wonderfully soft. Wish I could find them. I'll read up on this.

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Quote - i think lighting like this never happens in real life. to light an object 100% without any global illumination. thats why it looks strange.

have you tryed with the inverse square shaders?

I wouldn't say lighting like this never happens in real life - rarely, yes. And some bounce light is usually involved I agree.

Thanks for the suggestion about the inverse-square falloff lights btw - I was scoffed at a couple of years ago at another forum site for asking about whether this was possible with Poser lights - "not necessary" they said. Guess I was just ahead of the game.

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OK. I wrapped some printer paper around a can. I set it up on a chair with a black jacket behind it to prevent reflections lighting the can from behind. (Not totally successful but pretty close.)

To the right I set up my flash. Took a shot. Cropped it. Here it is.

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I loaded that into a Poser one-sided square to render it as is.

I loaded a Poser cylinder. I set up a point light at the same orientation as best as I can guess. This matters - moving the light even two inches changes the terminator a little, but drastically changes where the specular reflections are.

Since paper is not perfectly matte, there are specular reflections here.

I set up a material for my virtual paper cylinder as best as I can do.

I lined up the photo and the Poser cylinder and rendered in Poser Pro with GC on.

Here's what I get.

Not exactly the same - the terminator is just a tad softer in the photo. However, it is so subtle, I can't decide if it is because the paper is a little bit translucent or this is the low-light GC issue we're talking about. If the issue is translucence, then I can't really do anything about that in Poser. Not today's Poser. I need SSS.

What do you think?

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I wonder if some of the difference is because I didn't use an inverse-square falloff light. I didn't feel like spending the time to set one up.

Notice how the point closest to the light is a litte brighter in the photo than my rendered cylinder. I estimate the light was about 50 inches from the cylinder. Given the radius of the can is about 2.5 inches, that would put the terminator at 52.5 inches versus 50 inches for the right edge. The inverse square rule applied would result in about 10% more light at the closest point versus the terminator. That would certainly be noticed.

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Yep - the inverse square rule matters here over those 2.5 inches.

I got a better match overall. But now my simulated terminator ends early. This is not the result of GC versus sRGB. If that was the problem it would be brighter than real life. Instead it is slightly darker, while everything else matches. Looks like subsurface scattering is at work here.

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The other thing we have to consider here is that my wrapping paper around a can of tomato sauce does not give me a perfect cylinder. :)

Also, the paper doesn't wrap all the way around the can. So the back edges stick out a bit. Which means I had to guess how big to size my cylinder to match the photo, since I can't precisely see the back edge of the can in the photo. I could be off by half an inch, which would move the terminator a little bit.

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I'm assuming since our skin is presumably even more translucent than your paper that the transition might be even softer?
Interesting experiment.
I found a temporary workaround to the skin terminator issue that I can live with for now (you don't want to know what I did). I posted the pics in the VSS thread.
www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

Need sleep now.

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i am 100% sure that this was translucent.

new mistakes i think i found. there should be no shadows on around the cube right?

this is from the shadowcam.

the shadow map was 1024 and bias was 0,1. and it was a spotlight.

Poser light seems to originate from a point no matter what your light or shadowcam settings are. RayTraced or Shadowmapped. This causes big problems if you are trying to match say a cameraflash or even a lightbulb whose point of origins are much wider.

What I mean is, your object will always be struck from a narrow angle like a cone and will always cast a shadow where there should'nt be one.

Maybe a 2 or more light tandem is really needed to straighten the line.

Quote - new mistakes i think i found. there should be no shadows on around the cube right?

look at real life. those shadows do occur.. it's one of the visual cues we use to discern objects.

Quote - Poser light seems to originate from a point no matter what your light or shadowcam settings are. RayTraced or Shadowmapped. This causes big problems if you are trying to match say a cameraflash or even a lightbulb whose point of origins are much wider.

What I mean is, your object will always be struck from a narrow angle like a cone and will always cast a shadow where there should'nt be one.

Maybe a 2 or more light tandem is really needed to straighten the line.

i think this is not corret.

even if it is from a point there still should not be any shadow in my example.plus i think in other 3d software its also from a point. only area lights are not from a point.

I could be wrong...but that's how I understand it

Shadowcam Zeroed -90Xrot

Light is 0angle start 70end

Light is 160start 12end. No change. This is Shadowmapped but it's the same with RayTrace.

As to my thoughtless idea on having multiple mainlights,,, that creates a new set of rogue shadows that need to be tuned down and out of the non shadowed area (In this box test). Bias has to lower too. Big pita in a dark scene but good I think for studio lights.

Increasing the light distance helps obviously but with SM spots means raising the map size to avoid breakup and costs in rendertime.

Can someone please direct me to information about the Inverse Square Falloff node setup for lights? I did a forum search but I'm not convinced I found the best setup.

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one second

www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php

great shader.

Thanks ice-boy.

So I just have to remember to input the correct reference and light position into the nodes - Poser needs a built in version of this for sure so we don't have to enter these extra values (gets tricky with lots of lights as I'm using a fake area-light array).

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Biting my tongue. Biting my tongue. Biting my tongue.

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Sooooo.........I think I may hold off adding lots of nodes to all my lights (maybe just play a little). Ahem
I'd be surprised if you have a tongue left by the time P8 actually gets released.

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i am still searching for some papers for fast soft raytraced shadows. i found two.
could this be in the future in poser? bagginsbill you are the expert. what do you think? could this work with firefly?
artis.inrialpes.fr/Publications/2005/LAALA05/SoftShadowVolumesRT.pdf
www.tabellion.org/et/paper07/egsr07_mtsm.pdf

faster shadows are always good right he he :)

If we abandon displacement, yes these could be made to work. (Notice that Kerkythea, last I looked, did not support displacement but does support some very advanced lighting models.)

I'm actually not an expert on Firefly - stewer is. You should ask him. I know about some of its limitations, but I've never seen the code. I know, for example, that reflections don't track displaced surfaces correctly, but displacement was there first. Obviously adding ray-tracing to a REYES renderer is a compromise.

But there is no reason they should stick with Firefly. I really don't care too much what the renderer is and would be happy to use several dozen. What I don't want to deal with is several dozen different models for materials.

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aha i understand.

i am still suprised that after 10 years there are no mroe information on shadows that are fast as DM shadows and realistic as raytraced.
i guess it is hard to combine them together.

i remember that this was answered in another thread but i can not find it. i get problems with those lines on the ground.

my shadows settings are: raytraced,blur 20 and bias 0.8 .

IIRC, increase your bias.

Sometimes smoothing forces you to use a larger bias than you want. Do you have smoothing on? If so, disable it on the prop, so you can keep smoothing other things, and see what happens.

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if i disable smoothing on ground its the same.

i modeled this myself and its not textured yet so i can change the model. should i model it in a special way?

I don't know. I'm not much of a modeler. So far, what models I've made, I've not seen what you've got there.

Upon looking more closely, I see that all of the polygons are outlined, even the ones far away.

Are they welded? They should be. Are they double sided? They should not be.

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i imported in blender now and made it not double sided and also used welded .

its the same.

thanks for the help. but i guess its just a bug or something.

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: Which shadow is better? Ray Trace or Depth?