Ground shadow does not appear in Inventor render

[aries.1482]

Hi,

I have a problem in rendering a model with Inventor 2019. I turn on all shadow option, and in model view the shadow look well, but in rendered picture there no ground shadow. I try with many others model and still no ground shadow. Plz help me. Thanks!

(Sorry my english is not good.)

[mdavis22569 · Accepted solution]

Can you share your file ?

probably just missing a light or something 

[aries.1482]

Here the part, but i think there is no problem with it. May be my setting or Inventor issue.

[-niels- · Accepted solution]

I think @mdavis22569 is right and you need to add a local light in order to create your desired "hard shadow"

Here's what i did:

You'll probably have to play around with the intensity and Attenuation Compensation to get the end result you want, i just maxed them out.

(i left the settings for "Grey Room" on their default, you could try changing those as well)

Good luck and feel free to show your end result in a Friday pictures topic!

[aries.1482]

Thank for reply. I created a local light as you said and I get the ground shadow. But I wonder why:

- The "Grey room" lighting style has it own shadow, why this shadow doesn't appear so we must creat new local light.

- The ground shadow show in rendered picture (I think it is shadow of local light) is different from "preview" in model view (may be it's the shadow of "Grey room"). So we can't preview result before render.

[-niels-]

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@aries.1482 wrote:

Thank for reply. I created a local light as you said and I get the ground shadow. But I wonder why:

- The "Grey room" lighting style has it own shadow, why this shadow doesn't appear so we must creat new local light.

- The ground shadow show in rendered picture (I think it is shadow of local light) is different from "preview" in model view (may be it's the shadow of "Grey room"). So we can't preview result before render.

Yeah, i think Inventor is a bit misleading in that part.

Look at the tooltip in this screenshot for the shadow settings:

These are settings that only affect the "preview rendering", which i understand/suspect to be the viewport shadows.

So "Grey Room" doesn't really have a shadow of it's own, it's a global light that can only cast diffuse shadow.

(which you could see in your first screenshot)

The ground shadow in your render is indeed from the local light, the way it looks depends on how you position the light.

You are correct in that you do not get a preview of this shadow until you render, which isn't very user friendly.

A sort of workaround would be to set your render settings to a low quality and only a few iterations in order to create a quick preview, but you'll have to go back & forth between the light settings and rendering in order to get the shadows where and how you want them.

[aries.1482]

Oh, so confused!  But i look for some videos tutorial on youtube, exam this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrlfLYJfwXQ.

You see, in this he chose "Photo booth" lighting style, and no local light was activated. But the ground shadow show well as preview in model.

[-niels- · Accepted solution]

Yeah, i can understand your confusion.
Inventor does use IBL (Image Based Lighting) so the lighting in your scene is generated by the "background image".
The background images for "Grey Room" and "Photo Booth" differ, so this is why the rendering result is different.

Just try some of the other lighting styles, they won't have local lights but will have different light & shadow features depending on the image used.
With rendering, lighting is a big part of your setup... so it's best to choose a starting scene that gives a result you like and then add local lights to highlight specific area's of your model.
(or create hard shadows like you wanted here)

Just have fun with it!

[aries.1482]

Ok, I think that's alright. We must accept this "confusion" as a function in Inventor . They have to do something with this, hope better in next version.

[davis.j]

Sorry for the bump but does anyone have success with adjusting the density of the lighting in Studio?

I prefer to use the "Photo Booth" Style but I cant seem to adjust the density. I move the slider and the preview changes but the final render is identical to the one with a different density value. Is there another way to adjust the density. Everything else works fine. My Products renders look great except the darkness/weight of the shadows is overwhelming and looks too dark.

[-niels-]

As far as i can tell, this is the only setting that influences the shadow density in the final render:

But i don't really use Studio for rendering, so i might be wrong...

You can always try using Ray-tracing instead of Studio, then your settings in the lighting style will have more effect.

[davis.j]

Typically I use draft quality as it is faster and looks better to me.

I do use ray tracing for quick renders but it doesn't have transparency controls so it is useless for larger format content.

[-niels-]

I don't know what options you have left then, within Inventor anyways...
You might get better results with post-processing... adding more/better defined shadows in Photoshop or the like, but it would be more work then just rendering.
It might even be worth considering other software, easiest probably being Fusion for decent results without too much learning the software.

[davis.j]

@-niels-  Yeah that is basically what I have been doing. Just shape the shadows in photoshop with some effects to make it look more photo realistic. That transparency is so nice to have with Studio. I may try and make a new system style that is a copy of "photo booth" to try and get eh desired effect.

[-niels-]

@davis.j Just out of curiosity: are you saving the ray-tracing image through the small ray-tracing dialog (bottom right)?
What happens if you, instead, go to File>export> image?
When you use that method you can select an alpha capable filetype (png, tiff) and select "options" to enable a transparent background.
You'll have to wait for it to finish "generating offscreen image", but you should get a raytraced image without the background.
(i'm not 100% sure if it's truly alpha channel, my quick test generated a white background in a png, but it might help.)