[Maya] Shading issues on Creature render
Hi,
I'm not very experienced with modelling and ran into a problem. Most of the time I can find fixes but this time I'm just clueless on what the issue is. I threw a quick physical sun and sky into the scene to check how my creature would look shaded and all of the shadows look off. I marked some of the spots on the second picture which I can't explain why they look the way they do. The whole wings don't really make sense, but there are several other spots spread across the whole mesh.
First I thought it was the normals but they seemed fine. I checked the vertex normals, face normals, reversed normals, edge borders, double faces, lamina faces, smooth/hard edges. A lot of faces turned out to be non-planar but that shouldn't be a problem (I think) and triangulating the whole mesh didn't change anything.
When rendering the creature smoothed, all of the shading issues disappear meaning there aren't any problems with the geometry (right?). Now the last thing I can think of as the cause would introduce me to a lot more problems I don't know how to fix at this point, being...not enough geometry.
Any help/suggestions/solutions are welcome.
I'm not very experienced with modelling and ran into a problem. Most of the time I can find fixes but this time I'm just clueless on what the issue is. I threw a quick physical sun and sky into the scene to check how my creature would look shaded and all of the shadows look off. I marked some of the spots on the second picture which I can't explain why they look the way they do. The whole wings don't really make sense, but there are several other spots spread across the whole mesh.
First I thought it was the normals but they seemed fine. I checked the vertex normals, face normals, reversed normals, edge borders, double faces, lamina faces, smooth/hard edges. A lot of faces turned out to be non-planar but that shouldn't be a problem (I think) and triangulating the whole mesh didn't change anything.
When rendering the creature smoothed, all of the shading issues disappear meaning there aren't any problems with the geometry (right?). Now the last thing I can think of as the cause would introduce me to a lot more problems I don't know how to fix at this point, being...not enough geometry.
Any help/suggestions/solutions are welcome.
Replies
So you are right when you think "not enough geometry " some renderers have a shadow terminator option to deal with low poly geometry and minimise problems. Not mental Ray I am afraid. But even then you will not get those precise shadows you get in your smoothed geometry.
With realtime graphics you have some (expensive) alternatives, like realtime displacement and some clever shadowed occlusion.