Rendering with mapped and raytraced shadows simultaneously

[mbr]

I am doing an animation where I need to have cars. I am using RPC trees that need raytracing for the shadows, but the cars take way to long to ray trace the shadows. So I made a duplicate light and assigned soft shadows to it to light only the cars. The problem is that it needs the surface the shadows are on, too. So I have my road lit by the raytraced light and the mapped light, to have both the tree shadows and the car shadows, which makes it twice as bright as it should be. Is there a work around for this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[TAKA]

Hey mbr

 

try duplicating ur road and assign a matte/shadow material to it. then Include in the shadow mapped light only the cars and the matte/shadow road. And in ur raytraced light exclude the cars and the matte/shadow road (i'm refering to the inlcude/exclude properties of the lights).

Also move the shadow/matte road a few mm up(just in case something wrong happens).

 

Hope it works.

 

rgds

 

TAKA

[Wolf]

try xshadow

it comes with the forest plugin

 

lets you use shadow maps with opacity mapped trees

 

link here.... http://www.itoosoft.com/cgi-bin/download.cgi?ForestPackLite14

[quizzy]

or try this tutorial form rpc:

 

rpc shadow tutorial

[HeDaCoM]

the matte/shadow material solution is good. but sometimes duplicates too much faces and slow down also.

What I do is to include also the surfaces in the shadow map light... so. I get the surfaces iluminated twice! what I do then? Create another light in the same position of the sun without shadows and including only the surfaces, with multiplier -1.0 or the same value as the positives but negative.

 

BUT. I don't suggest you to use shadow maps for animations. they have a flickering effect sometimes. Use raytraced ones. heh

[TAKA]

oops....forgot about negative lights.....nice one Hedacom

 

rgds

 

TAKA

[mbr]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I tried the negative lights and it works wonderfully! I'll try the matte/shadow materials, as well. I am a little hesitant to install plugins that I don't know anything about...but it looks interesting.

Again, thanks for saving my shadows!

[HeDaCoM]

great mbr ! keep comming here !

[TAKA]

Hedacom! u're the man!