sharp shadows

alexworx

Hi All,

I am looking for a bit of guidance on this small outdoor project. Right now I just have a light source giving off some dark crisp shadows. I am looking to get more of soft shadow look to this, not so dark and crisp.

Would a hdri dome type of setup work better to achieve that look? If so are there any good resources on that? If not how do I get my shadows not to be so dark and sharp?

As always thanks for the time.

Alex

Obscura

Soft shadows happens when something is lit by an area light. Something that has extents, like a plane, or sphere. But this also depends on the size of that object, and the distance from the object that gets lit. In the real works, sun had some size and distance from the earth, so its shadow penumbra is mostly consistent. The reason for why you can still see soft sunlight shadows sometimes, is because there can be overcast for example, that will make the sunlight acts like a huge plane light as it goes through the clouds and scatter. So the clouds makes the shadows soft, and having them soft makes sense only in case of area lights.

https://www.google.rs/search?q=shadow+umbra&client=opera&hs=n36&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjq9s6LhYjRAhWEzxQKHcjnBWAQ_AUICCgB&biw=1920&bih=1010#tbm=isch&q=shadow+penumbra

To adjust the softness of a directional light shadows, you can set it to be a stationary light, and then you can use the light source angle parameter. This does not work with static directional light though.

As for their darkness, yes, a hdri setup or a skylight with a skydome would work.  But you can also manually control the amount of bounces in the world settings/lightmass. And there is a multiplier in every light to tell how much they contribute into the indirect lighting. Its called indirect lighting intensity.

alexworx

thanks Obscura for the info. I will play around with some of that stuff.

Alex

Daedalus51

Like Obscura mentioned you can use area soft shadows on the directional light. You just have to activate that checkbox in the directional light. HOWEVER, this makes the stationary directional light behave like the static one in terms of lightmap resolution.

Normally the directional light in stationary mode bakes distance field shadows to shadowmaps. Because of that, shadows look better with lower lightmap rez- When you swith to that soft shadow mode, they get baked into regular shadow maps, thus you need a lot higher lightmap rez and baking quality settings to achieve a noise free result.

Play around with the settings and see what you like most

alexworx

Thanks for everyone's input. Here a few screen grabs of the final lighting. Much better then the original. I did wind up using a hdri. I am going to go back and try some of the other suggestions.