United3dArtists Archive

How do you control the shadows in workspace side? I load them by using the supplied light setups on the workspace side but I don't see any way to adjust the shadows as they look fuzzy and washed out.

Jack Edwards:
"Infinite lights don't cast shadows in Workspace, so you'll need to use a Directional light for realtime shadows. You'll need to set the size large enough to cover your scene. The light will need to be a certain distance from the objects to work correctly -- unlike the infinite light.

There are a lot of settings for controlling quality:
FilteringQuality
FilterSize
MapSize
SamplesCount

The two simplest changes that will make the largest difference are to increase the shadow MapSize value to something like 4096 (keep in mind this uses up a lot of ram on your video card so that may limit how high you can go) and then subdivide the surface receiving the shadow to give it more geometry. The shadowing is calculated per polygon, so if you have large polygons they will have poorer quality shadows. So for best results you want to try to maintain a uniform polygon density for mesh receiving the shadow."

Parva:
"Shadow Casting lights are (currently) Spot, Directional and Projector Light.
At the sample of the Directional Light (only this has the Lightbeam setting).
The two important settings are Light beam "Size" and Shadow "Map Size".

Adjust the beam size to the area you want to cover with shadows
but keep in mind that you will need a larger shadow map to get fine details,
if you want a large beam size.

A large shadow map can cover more details like a large texture map.
2048 is mostly a high enough setting. Normal are 512 or 1024.

Some additional settings are the "bias" control.
Here you can set the accuracy of the shadow casting. A lower value will even cast shadows from fine mesh details. I don't know the exact description for this feature yet but you can take a look in the manual.

The filtering use PCF (Percentage Closer Filtering) if you move the slider from left to right you increase the Blur calculation."