A whole number of rendering problems

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am having 3 different problems with rendering and I can't find any support for them. First of all shadows are very jagged even with high render quality, second when I try to correct the shadow color to the color of the shadows in the image the entire shadow turns white (The color used by default is black, it turns white when I correct it to red 56, green 56, blue 51, hue 43, sat 23, value 56) and finally no matter what I do the render turns out over exposed. I have included the original photo for comparison. Does anyone have any advice for this? I would be willing to answer questions. Thanks!  

[Anonymous]

Something worth mentioning is that the render looks fine in the in program render. I have included a photo for comparison.

[darawork]

Hi,

It looks like you are using mapped shadows, take a look at the help info for your particular shadow type on this page:

https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/3DSMa...

Shadow Mapped shadows page: http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2016/ENU/?guid=GUID-4BF878CD-5BD6-4F1A-A20B-8A6BD7D3703B

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your reply, however I checked and I am not using mapped shadows. I also played around with the shadow color and found that the shadow only turns white if the color value is greater than one. If the color value is set to completely black (zero) the shadow looks fine. For the test renderings I made I didn't use soft shadows. The first included photo had the value set to 1 and the second photo had the value set to 0.

[Anonymous]

Oh sorry, turns out I was using mapped shadows. 😛 I tried increasing the quality of the render significantly, turning up shadow samples to 1024 and render quality to 20 and nothing works. Do you have any ideas about what to do?

[darawork · Accepted solution]

Perhaps read the whole chapter about Lighting: http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2016/ENU/?guid=GUID-1F10D9B5-BB7F-4422-B5A6-4731F144AE35

The best way to learn something, and for it to stick, is to learn it yourself and not be told how to do it. A bit like home schooling. 

Failing that, there are hundreds of tutorials on Youtube concerning all aspects of Lighting and Shadows: http://goo.gl/BaBVhK

[Anonymous]

So, I followed your advice and everything worked except for the shadows being white when you change the color. For some strange reason after a while this somehow fixed itself. I have included a rendering of basically the final version of the the test using very high Final Gather Precision & 2X high quality Soft Shadows Precision. If someone comes along with the same problem here's the specs I used:

Light Properties

• On checked
• Targeted checked

Shadows

• On checked
• Use Global Settings checked
• using Mental Ray Shadow Map

Light Distribution: Spotlight

Light Cone

• Hotspot/beam: 30
• Falloff/Field: 75

Color

D65 Illuminant

Intensity

cd 50000 (I think this is what somehow fixed the shadow color issue)

Object Shadows

• Dens. 1
• Light Affects Shadow Color checked

Emit light from (Shape)

Disc

Radius: 10000

Rendering

Shadow Samples: 32

Mental Ray Shadow Map

Map Size: 10000 (This is really how far I had to turn it up, the default of 512 wasn't nearly close enough.)

Sample range: .005

samples: 4

I had transparent shadows disabled however it seems to work fine with it anyways.

I hope this helps someone who happens to have the same obscure problem I have.