low res shadows in scene

[Anonymous]

Can someone tell me what makes shadows stair step. Its like low resolution or something.

https://gyazo.com/1f35a14e3d250aadfb8c9b8807d20a16

[leeminardi]

If you are using Shadow Map it could be caused by a small value for the Map Size. Try increasing the map size or better yet use Ray Traced shadows. What renderer are you using?

~Lee

[kgokhangurbuz]

Hi;

Provided screenshot is from a viewport, seeing shadows in viewport like this is perfectly normal. If you want more precise shadows in viewports please follow these steps;

Click on viewport > Shading type (image1)

Go to Configure

Under Visual Appearance and style tab, you'll find Lighting & Shadows Quality (image2)

image1                                                                              image2

This will increase the shadow image quality in your viewports

Can you please upload a rendered image and give information about your render engine, light source types etc if you have shadow problems in renders too?

Regards;

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply

My renders are always ok its just the viewport.

I changed my Lighting and Shadows quality to the maximum and it still shows a stair step effect in my shadows. Now here it the interesting thing. I made a line to point out the stair step affect and then the shadow goes a wait. If i delete the line it comes back. This is strange.

https://gyazo.com/a0039dd06eb4f12ab3c0f16a999574d0

https://gyazo.com/3b4c66e6631e607856fd694feda192a5

https://gyazo.com/0a7acf3b4f631822ab1e836d7cf0031d

I removed everything but this conveyor to make the file smaller to send. Not look at the shadows. they went from stair step to shutter effect.

https://gyazo.com/0b37a04d6e742daec86da014048b4b64

[kgokhangurbuz]

Hi;

Well, having these kind of things in viewports are perfectly normal to me but i wonder what your display driver is selected as.

Are you using Nitrous, OpenGL or D3D?

[Anonymous]

Nitrous

Well if it is normal to you then maybe I should not worry about it. Its strange because it is not all the time. Sometimes its fine.

[spacefrog_ · Accepted solution]

there is one hidden setting regarding shadow quality in Nitrous viewports which is nowhere exposed in the UI.

It's the Nitrous shadowmap size limit which defaults to 512

To crank that value up, you can type the following in the maxscript listener ( 4096 being used as example here )

Nitrousgraphicsmanager.shadowmapsizelimit=4096

Do that in your scene you posted, and the artefacts will be gone.

Unfortunately this setting does'nt get stored in any config file, nor with the scene itself. Thus it resets itself with each 3ds Max restart. Though you could place the command inside  a script and copy that script to your 3ds Max scripts\startup folder  ...

 Or - for your convenience -  you could use my PowerPreview script, which provides a comprehensive UI to tweak your viewport setup for optimal quality ( or anyway you want it ). Just download from scriptspot

This is how the UI looks about

Regarding your scene viewport setup in general:

You are using the default lights with 2 lights in your viewport settings, not the scene lights. Default lights depend on your viewport camera position, the second light angle will be positioned even worse, thus you will have such shadow artefacts much more likely. In your case, the second light is placed pretty coplanar to some of your surfaces , thus the obvious artefacts

[Anonymous]

great info thanks!

[senorpablo]

This has been hardcoded to 512 as long as I can remember. We now have video cards with 8GB of RAM, where 512MB was common when viewport shadows were first introduced. 

I think it's time to up the default, or at least provide a discreet setting for it.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for you input

Sorry just realized i did not reply

[earthman1970]

I do not seem to have that tab in my configure viewport settings?