Inventor Studio Wavy Shadows

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone.  I am rendering some fairly simple parts and am having trouble with the shadows appearing wavy.  I have adjusted every render setting I can find, and nothing seems to help.

Also, if you look very closely, the edges are not smooth (but do not match the wave of the shadows).

See attachment.

Any ideas?

[sam_m]

Can you please provide more info - what version of Inventor?  Have you applied all patches/hot-fixes?  How are you rendering (through Studio, realistic or raytracing)?

[mpatchus]

In Studio, to "smooth out" the shadows, you need to tweak the shadow settings for the light style.

You have to identify the light that is casting that particular shadow, and change the shadow settings to

smooth. 

In this example I used the "stock" Shop Light style and was able to create an example of the "wavy" shadow you are encountering.

I adjusted the Light Style to use SMOOTH shadows with HIGH quality like so (in this case Light 2 of the Shop Lighting style).

You could also adjust the style shadow setting, and then have all the individual lights in that style to use the style setting.

The render after shadow adjustments to the light style now shows a smooth shadow edge.

So why not just make smooth the default setting for all your lights?

It is a trade off.

You can have shadow accuracy but to do so you will trade rendering time to achieve it.

You will notice that smooth shadows take much longer to process (even for this very simple part, rendering time was increased more than ten fold).

[Anonymous]

Mike,

Thank you for the info!  Unfortunately, that didn't seem to solve the problem.  I too am using the shop lighting, and I changed the main style shadow settings, as well as each individual light's settings to no avail.  I have attached an updated rendering where I point out the problem areas.  Any ideas?

Also, I am using Inventor Pro 2013 64 bit.  Build 200, Release 2013 SP2

[blair]

Check that your Output is set to High-Quality as well.

[Anonymous]

Tried that too with no luck.

For now, I've turned shadows off for the light that casts the shadows causing a problem.  I will move forward that way, but will certainly appreciate any other suggestions!

[blair]

Try a different Light Environment. It almost looks like each light is casting it's own wave.