Weak shadows.

[raymondwganderson]

Hello All,   attached is a pic of part of a support system  rendered in Vred.    The materials are by Substance Designer but my problem is as follows,  I added a Substance to the Ground plane and now as you will see from the pic the shadows are very weak.   I have turned them up to the strongest possible,  but still very weak.  Would it be because I have added a Substance to the ground plane ?  before ...when it was just the default ground plane, the shadows were far better . 

Regards,

Raymond.

[Christian_Garimberti]

Hi Raymond,

you can duplicate your groundplane so you can assign to one the substance material, and to the other leave the shadow material.

Put the one with the shadow material slightly upper the other one.

Best

Chris

[raymondwganderson]

Hi Christian,  Many thanks for your help with this problem.   Attached is a screenshot of my attempt at adding the duplicate ground plane.  I can't add the shadow material to it , it remains as you see it here.  if I turn it off, then the original is still as before. Obviously I am making an error [ s ] somewhere during the duplicate process.    I have tried moving both plane up and down but still no joy.

Maybe I will have to start again with both the ground planes created before I start adding the texture. 

Regards,

Raymond.

[Christian_Garimberti]

Hi, it seems that you have set the shadowmaterial as Solid instead of transparent.

Best

Chris

[raymondwganderson]

Hello Christian,  attached are 2 views one with the second ground plane ON and the other with the second ground plane OFF.  As you will see the one with the second plane ON alters the colour of the model  [ darkens it ].   It is maybe just a case of trial and error on my part until I get the look I need.   The ground plane with the shadow material is just a fraction above the one with the Substance material. 

Regards,

Raymond.

[Christian_Garimberti · Accepted solution]

HI Raymond,

the shadowplane above a geometry darken a little bit the geometry, but the shadows are sharper and darker.

I don't know if you have used a light source or the lights from the environment, but the results are the same.

You can always adjust the color of the ground, if needed, to avoid the darkening.

Big Question... you'll render in OPENGL or RT?

Best

Chris

[raymondwganderson]

Hello Christian,  Thank you so much for all your help with this, much appreciated.   I render in Ray tracing.  and thanks to your info I  have now got the ideas behind the duplicate plane.  

Attached is the latest render with the shadows altered, I am happier with that.  I am still on  the learning curve with the software. 

Regards,

Raymond.

[michael_nikelsky]

I am assuming you are using a HDR for lighting the scene? A common issue is that many HDRs out there are not really covering bright areas light the sun very well which is why your shadows are not as dark as they should be. Using a secondary shadowplane is more an ugly workaround since it will slow down rendering as the shadowplane is quite expensive to evaluate.

What you can do instead is to go to the Material Editor, select the Environment and then from the popup-menu use Boost Light. This will scale up the bright areas in you HDR to give you a more realistic result. Not however that this is not undoable, you will have to reload the hdr if you want to go back.

Kind regards

Michael

[Christian_Garimberti]

Hi Michael,
you always have the best solution!
But is the Boost Light a new function? I did not know it.
There is no documentation in the help. Do you have something to better understand how manage it?

Best
Chris

[michael_nikelsky]

Mmmmhh....the boost light function is rather old actually, 6 years at least when looking at the code. But you are right, the documentation seems to be missing. I will create a ticket for this.

It basically works by multiplying the values above the threshold you specify by a certain factor in a weighted way. So if you use the default threshold of 95% only those pixels brighter than 95% of the maximum brightness in the HDR will get their values increased by  a maximum of the factor you choose.

[raymondwganderson]

Hi Michael, thanks for the extra info. I will try it out later and see how
it turns out.
Regards,
Raymond.