Anyone managed to get shadows or ambient occlusion to look good?

[eobet]

I'm sitting here looking at my coworkers Catia screen and I'm getting a bit jealous. The shadows in that application look so bloody good! And you don't even have to calculate it, it's all real time.

Meanwhile, in Alias, my shadows (using a manually placed directional light) are ugly, black, hard edged blobs.

Anyone have any tips to get shadows to look good in Alias, while you're editing your model?

[andrewmole]

Hi,

I'm not sure but would like to help, is the following image good for you ?

[eobet]

No, you do not have any ambient occlusion in that image, nor any projected shadows at all. Place the sphere above the cube and have the sphere cast a shadow on the cube instead, and you'll be a bit closer.

(What you have is a ground plane shadow only, which isn't what I asked for in this topic.)

[andrewmole]

Hi,

Thank you for the reply. I see... I never play with ambient occlusion before. It looks like we have to manually calculate it in Alias to get it displayed...

[eobet]

Right, so the moment we edit any object, the calculated shadows become wrong.

Also, try inserting a directional light into the scene and then enable hardware shading and self shadowing. Those are actually realtime, but it looks really bad on default settings, and I haven't found any setting to make it look good either.

[andrewmole]

Hi,

If you don't mind, could you share the wire file?

[eobet]

This has nothing to do with any particular wire file. It is a general problem. You can use any file you like.

[andrewmole]

Hi,

I know. I'm requesting for it because I'm lazy to create a new one.

[digiformer]

As far as i can say i did not find a solution for soft shadows in shaded mode over the years. Its not only Catia, at least 1 other 3D app i know, has it, too.

I am not familiar with the latest release, i hoped it would be possible today...

For lighter shadows, put 2 lights in the same place. One light is set to low light intensity and has shadows set to ON. The light intensity controls the blackness of the created shadows. The other one lightens the scene with shadows turned OFF. I know this is no "pro-way", but sadly in Alias the only workaround  which worked. 

Regarding Ambient Occlusion, i am getting along with it...

Regards...

[eobet]

Nice workaround, but still looks really sad compared to Catia.

In Alias 2015, there's supposedly a new diagnostic shading mode called "clayao" where the "ao" stands of "ambient occlusion and actually has a checkbox, but I've tried toggling it on and off without explicitly calculating it and I can't tell the difference.

[digiformer]

driving the lighter-shadows-workaround much further, one could try to achieve soft shadows via multiple lights.

Though this is rather kind of an xmas-fun than a serious suggestion!

Btw, my Alias crashed at 7 to 9 lights... I remember Alias doesnt like shadows too much. I had it crashing when using too much area lights with shadows. It said something with a string was too long to calculate...*shruggs*