So i'm about to do something i have't done in a long time, and that's use depth map shadows. I generally use ray-traced shadows because they're better. However, i'm planning on doing a little mini-comic with the Horde werewolf, with about 10 panels, and because of his hair, it would take forever using ray-tracing, so i'm switching to depth mapped shadows for it.

Is there a way to get the shadows crisper and nicer looking? I already turned the shadow blur radius down to 1. Is there anything else i can change to get better looking edges? Would increasing the shadow map size help?

All that stuff can nullify the speed gain, so I would say sort of radius .05 , a 1024 map

If you are using P9 and up, you can increase depth map shadow map size up to a maximum of 2000. Under P9 and up, you can decrease render time with transmapped hair in ray-trace by unchecking the Light Emitting box on your properties tab for each hair prop or figure. This works for me most of the time. But with ten figures at one time in a scene, I can see why you would consider using Depth Mapped shadows again.

Use the shadowcam of the light casting shadow and zoom in so it covers all elements which are in view in the camera. That makes more efficient use of the shadowmap and gives crisper shadows

JimTS: Yeah, i tried a blur radius of 1 (it doesn't let me go below that for some reason), and a 2048 map, and the render time was about 5 mins. With raytracing, the render time is 1 hour! It looks like a higher shadow map does give better and crispier shadow outlines.

Latexluv: I tried this before on the horde werewolf figure, but for some reason turning off the light emitter on all the hair wasn't working. I'm not sure why it didn't, since it seems to work on other figures hair. It comes with Horde "Body hair A" and Horde "Mane hair A", and the body hair has like 30 material zones. Do i need to turn off light emitter for all 30 material zones for it to work?

winvdb: Thanks! I'll try that out.

Quote - Latexluv: I tried this before on the horde werewolf figure, but for some reason turning off the light emitter on all the hair wasn't working. I'm not sure why it didn't, since it seems to work on other figures hair. It comes with Horde "Body hair A" and Horde "Mane hair A", and the body hair has like 30 material zones. Do i need to turn off light emitter for all 30 material zones for it to work?

That sounds like there was dynamic hair griups on the werewolf? And yes, you would have to disable the light emiter on all the hair groups. (did something like that recently with Tiny's long haired cat... it was a pain L)

The good thing is, I think Snarlygribbly updated his Scenefixer to be able to turn light emitters off everything at once (or he should ;))