Soft Shadows in Arnold 2018

[lloyd22]

Hi,

I'm just rendering this simple scene of a stack of business cards, and I was also doing some tests with the Arnold renderer in Max 2018. The problem is I can't work out how to get soft or diffused shadows using Arnold and the Arnold lights, is there a particular setting to make that happen?

The scene attached was rendered using area shadows and a direct light, but I get the light bleeding under the front of the stack of cards so it looks like its floating above the ground plane.

I'm not usually using 3dsmax for finished renders, so in the end I'll use whatever gives me the nicest look, so any suggestions would be great.

Lloyd

[rendermaster · Accepted solution]

- the shadow gap can be corrected by adjusting area shadow bias to zero

- soft shadow can be achieve by adding filler light opposite your main target light at low intensity and or try to adjust area light dimension

[Alfred.DeFlaminis · Accepted solution]

Hello @lloyd22 and welcome to the community,

Did the helpful post by @rendermaster solve this for you?  

I just wanted to add that if the Xform for those objects is way outside of 100% then it may also lead to shadow weirdness in any render engine.  If you right click on the scale tool on the main toolbar with a card selected, it should read 100 all the way down.  If it's up over a few thousand, weird things like this can also happen with some render engines and the best idea is to Reset the Xform.  Just something to be aware of. 

EDIT: Added Reset Xform link.

Best Regards,

[lloyd22]

Ok, thanks. That's helped a lot.

Lloyd

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

No problem at all @lloyd22.  Is this issue resolved for you now? If not, please let me know how I can help and I'll do whatever I can.  Or, if the super helpful post by @rendermaster or any other post helped solve this for you, please mark it as a solution so that the next person can be helped by it.  Thanks very much!

Best Regards,