Shadow linking ?!

[moss]

Does anyone know of a way to have some objects cast shadows from one light and others cast shadows from another light while having those shadows be received by everything? Essentially, shadow linking like you can do in 3ds MAX.

My situation is I have a scene where I want some cliffs to cast fuzzy, low res shadows, but then the rocks, trees and characters shadows won't show up because they are to small. So I want to have a duplicate light casting a sharper shadow from those objects.

[moss]

To answer myself, you make one light casting "X" type shadows, duplicate and change to "Y" type shadows. Duplicate again. Turn of shadows on the 3rd light and make its intensity negative. Connect all three lights to everything (turn off illuminates by default). Turn off shadow casting on all objects. Duplicate all objects. Turn off everything EXCEPT shadow casting on the duplicate objects. Now connect the lights only to the duplicate (shadow-casting) objects that you want to cast shadows from. (If you want object "A" to cast "X" shadows then connect A's duplicate only to the light with "X" shadows. If you don't want object "B" to cast any shadows don't connect its duplicate to any lights.)

Does anybody find this usefull? Does anyone know a nicer way? Can Maya 4 do shadow linking?

[ahmed-1]

"some objects cast shadows from one light and others cast shadows from another light "

Don't see the problem. What's wrong with light-linking and keep different lights casting different shadows??

The use of signatures in e-mail is a complete waste of time.

[moss]

In reply to:
Don't see the problem. What's wrong with light-linking and keep different lights casting different shadows??

Perhaps I need to elaborate. I needed to have different objects cast shadows from different lights. So you say, I'll just link this light to this object and that light to that object. Now they are casting different shadows.

Now in order for an object to recieve those shadows it needs to be connect to both lights which would make it too bright so we add a negative light. So far so good.

But now if the objects recieving the shadows also need to cast shadows on themselves and other objects it gets complicated. Hence the crazy procedure I described.