antialiasing shadows

[oluv]

hi all!

 

i use ies-sun with ray-traced shadows and have problems with jaggy shadow-edges. my goal is to create some lighting-maps, but as they are rendered quite small the effect gets even worse when viewed blown up in the scene.

i tried different anti-aliasing settings, but it doesn't seem to have a real effect on the shadow edges. everything else is great, only the shadows cause problems.

 

i tried to blur the lightmap afterwards in photoshop but this affects also other areas of the map.

 

i attached a screenshot of the lightmapped final VR-scene and some quick renderings with different anti-aliasing filters to demonstrate the effect. increasing the anti-aliasing filter-size only blurs the image, but doesn't really avoid the jaggies. are there other settings i miss maybe?

 

thanks for any help!

[abicalho]

Enable SuperSampling for the materials receiving the shadow, or, if MAX 6 or higher, you can enable supersampling globally in the renderer.

 

Alexander

[STRAT]

those AA issues with the shadows in the main pick aren't actually AA issues. it's just your shadow map size is way to small. double it atleast then see what results you get.

 

but if it's a ray traced shadow then do as abicalho suggests

[oluv]

it is raytraced shadow indeed.

 

i tried supersampling, but it takes 4 times longer to render!

 

i never had such issues with lightscape before. 4x4 aa got rid of all jaggies and the rendering-time was still quick.

[STRAT]

nah, c4d doesnt give these probs either. max's shadow have always been on the crap side. SS does take longer, but try a lower SS setting, and a different sampler even.

[quizzy]

since you are doing a VR model I would suggest you make the lightmap bitmaps a larger scale, lets say 1024x1024. And maybe dont use MIP-MAPPING for the light maps.