Pixelated, flickering dmap shadows

[loganb]

I'm having a problem getting decent shadows in my animated scene.

The scene : camera following a character as he walks into town.Distant hills far in the background. So the character's cast shadow changes as he moves...but the building shadows need to be static.

I'm using a directional light to simulate sunlight.

I'm using Depth map shadows.
my depth map rsolution is set to 1280. Is that reasonmable?

with the default settings, I get large flickering pixels in my shadows.
not that noticeable on the moving character shadow, but looks bad on buildings.

I've tried mesing with various settings but I'm having trouble getting results.

how should I approach this?

[atyss]

Bear in mind I have experience mostly with mental ray, so what if you're using the Maya renderer my comments may not apply. Anyway, here it goes.

In mr, although you can use shadow maps in directional lights, it is highly unrecommended for the same reason. The shadow map is a like a texture projected through the light onto the objects. Since the directional light has no origin, the shadow map will be distributed accross the entire scene. So if you scene is medium or large-size, you get blocky shadow edges and flickering in animation.

The only solution is to either increase the shadow map resolution to super high settings (like 4096 or more)..... or to change your lighting set and use several spots to focus the shadow map resolution on key areas. You should also consider rendering the character shadow on a separate pass and composite it.

Cheers
Bernard

[rival2000]

Can you use ray traced shadows?

[joojaa]

there is a third allternative. ITs a bit of work but i use it all the time.

Make on dmap shadow for the buildings and one shadoew that is only affected by the character. Thisway you neednt update the dmap for the houses if the light does not move (also if it does not then you might want to bake a ratraced shadeow to a texture and mltiply it in)

Its a hard job to do witha a lightlinker and a few different metarial connections bot its dooable.

Also simple raytrace si fast, but not a smooth one.