Scale and shadow problem and topic

sparks24

I was wondering if the scale of my mesh effects the way shadows are casted on my mesh?

Looking through some old Marmoset topics, I found a "scale cube" that is the height of a 6 foot tall human, and I was wondering if this was still relevant to 2.08. My object is at least 50x (fifty times) the size of that cube, and I noticed some problems when in regular format (original size) and scaled down (down to the scale of the cube), namely really jagged shadows. In the regular format (large sized mesh), there's an additional problem where each vertex on my mesh casts some shadow artifact (this problem was noticeable with the inclusion width+length properties for lights). Pics coming up soon.

sparks24

On the left is the scaled down mesh to the "cube object", and it produces jaggy edges, even with a bit of width set in the light properties. On the right, I have the larger sized mesh (50x the size of the cube), and to alleviate the effect of jaggies, I have to increase the width and length of the omni light, which produces artifacts shown here (you can see the artifacts are produced along the topology of my mesh, which is the dotted blue line). In the larger mesh I put my scene scale as "meters", and for the smaller mesh, it is "centimeters". Any fix for these problems?

sparks24

Bump...

EarthQuake

Hey, sorry for the late response.

First off, scaling your object to the size of the scale cube is a good idea, that way your light size and falloff settings will be within a reasonable range, and the skin shader settings should work a bit better too.

Unfortunately there is no way to remove shadow jagginess entirely, as it's a limitation of the shadow mapping technique that we use. However, you can turn on High-Res shadows in the render tab to get better shadows. Shadow resolution is shared by the entire scene as well, so if you have a very large object and a very small object in the same scene, the small object will get less shadow resolution.

Playing with the light width settings usually helps a lot, and generally (unless you scale is out of whack) you should be able to turn the width setting up just enough to get a nice soft edge and hide jagginess. However, it is worth noting that turning the light width setting to a very high value can cause other artifacts. The shadow blur setting in the skin shader also helps quite a bit. Sometimes the contact refinement setting the light properties can cause artifacts, try turning that off to see if things improve.

Finally, the front-face shadow option can help with certain types of shadow artifacts, namely gaps in the shadow projection due to holes/uncapped geometry.

sparks24

Thanks @EarthQuake . Will try adjusting my scene back to smaller size and see if that makes a major difference.