Blocky shadows! I want smooth ones - how?

[seddon]

I've migrated from 3D Studio MAX 2.5 to Maya 3.0.1. In MAX you create a sphere and the shadows on it are smooth and realistic by default. In Maya they are square. I increase the tesselation count and the shadows improve somewhat but you can still see jaggies. How do I get smooth shadows?

[kungkrille]

If you are using depth map shadows you may need to raise the filter (dmap filter if I remember)...
If raytracing shadows try to raise the number of rays..

Maya is Power

[audun]

Also play with bias, in render globals for raytrayce or in lightShape for depth map Bias.
-Audun

[audun]

and only use small values for the bias somthing like 0.1 to 0.002

[perseus2]

blocky shadows are caused either by too small a resolution on the dmap or too large a ground plane to catch the shadows, or a combination of the two.

Increasing the filter will soften the edges of a low-res shadow, increasing the dmap resolution will sharpen up the edges and reduce the blockiness.

Increasing the bias will not affect the blocky shadows, it will help to reduce banding or "self-shadowing".

Check out my tutorial on lights and shadows at www.halbstein.com/tutorials.htm, there's a whole section in the first tut. about depth maps