Vray Sun Shadows

[Jock]

How exactly do you go about controlling the shadows produced when you use vray sun in a scene?

 

In a tutorial i done a long time ago it mentions putting the vraysky into the environment slot in the render settings, which kinda helps though it does affect the colour of the scene, but that can be sorted with the colour balance. Is this what you should do when youre working on an exterior scene or should it be avoided?

 

In a thread i read it tells you to alter the exposure settings in your physical camera but that seems to blow out the other areas of the image that were otherwise fine previously.

 

All in all the default settings for the sun seems to make the shadows too dark, so anyone able to tell me how you get round this issue?

 

Thanks

[Jason Matthews]

The shadows are controlled by the sun size. The larger the number the more blurry the shadows. You will need to increase the default subdivisions of the shadows. The sky works off of the settings form the sun. check out http://www.spot3d.com for info on the sun and sky settings.

 

You have two options when dealing with the vray sun/sky system as it pertains to cameras. The first option is to use a vray camera in the scene which allows you to control the real world camera values to get the exposure and shadows right. The second option is to reduce the multiplier of the sun from 1.0 to maybe 0.01 (different scenes = different settings).

 

I think overall you wil need may need to look into linear work flow (LWF) when dealing with the sun/sky system. This is my opinion. Someone please correct me if I am wrong. It will take a lot of playing around with to get the settings just right. I learned quickly by using VrayRT. It allows me to make adjustments to the sun and see the results instantly rather than waiting for the test render.

 

Remember that there are several ways to illuminate an exterior scene in vray. In the end choose the one that works with your workflow.

[Jock]

Thanks for the reponse, its helpful.