Question About Soft Shadows, Plz Help

[dkashtan]

Hi, I am new to Maya and I am having a hard time getting soft shadows from my lighting. I've been messing around with raytraced shadows and depth map shadows, but I keep getting a very hard lined and unrealistic shadow. I am using an area light. Are there any good tutorials on lighting and shadows or can someone help me out? Thanks in advance

[gmask]

If you are using depth amps you need to increase the filter value to get soft shadows. Area lights are tyopically soft so I don't know why you would get hard edges from one. If you were using a spotlight I'd say to increase the light radius and shadow rays.

[dkashtan]

I am using depth maps and I changed the filter value to 5 and now I am getting a soft shadow, but the shadow is pixelated and blocky as it fades from black. I tried messing with some depth maps settings, but I had no luck in getting a smooth and realistic soft shadow, does anybody know what could be going wrong?

[gmask]

Well the problem with depth maps is that the wider their coverage they more pixels you need in the map and then you'll have to up the filter settings higher.

So try increasing the resolution of your map to 2048.

[joojaa]

If your using mr go to the mentalray sections and increase samples for the dmap shadow calc

[dkashtan]

I have my resolution to 5692 and my Fog Shadow Samples to 9981, both were just increased, and it the shadow is still grainy, but a little better... any other suggestions?

[dezz]

thats way to much detail IMO

The left shadow is raytraced, with light radius of 5 and 100 ray samples

The right one is depth shadow map, with resolution 1024, 0.15 softnes and 100 samples again.

Your resolution and samples settings are way too high. What is the size of your scene? If you are casting a shadow over a very big region you might want to use raytraces shadows, in order to keep away from insane values, it will take a bit longer to render, but personaly I like raytraced shadows more, they are more accurate. If you are casting a big shadow you might find resolution insufficient even at extremly high settings

Try using higher anti aliasing quality, that may help a lot to solve grainy shadows.