OTOY Forums

Hi,

I am working on a large scale scene with a lot of vegetation. However, I cannot get the shadows for the vegetation to be seen clearly. I did tests and concluded that because the objects are small relative to the scene size they do not cast a very visible shadow. Is there a way I can make the shadows more pronounced even if the objects are small? Same scene, same lighting scenario, with Arnold, produces excellent shadows. Where is the problem?

Regards

I don't know if this can help, but i work on large scale project (1.5 km scene with 750m of classical architecture). For different reason we work at scale 1 with cm unite, so the scene is 150000 cm and effectively render problemes appears.
For render I scale the scene by 1/100 and all is fine. But i know, in some case scale a scene can be also problematic.

Thanks for the suggestion. I actually tried that first but it didn't work because even if you scale up or scale down, the objects remain the same size, strictly speaking, relative to the scene.

Check the sun size setting: IIRC, a small sun size produces hard dark shadows, a large sun size blurry and soft ones.
If also that doesn't suffice, you might render the shadows as a separate render pass and later on in photoshop make it darker.

Thanks, but it wasn't that. I figured out what it is, it was the displacement map on the terrain. When I removed it, shadows appeared again. However, because the terrain has been Zremeshed it has these wierd artifacts that only go away either when the terrain is made very small or when there is displacement on it. Can these artifacting be fixed somehow, cause I tried everything I can think of? (see attachement). This normals artifacting doesn't appear in Arnold for example.

I read all I could find on the forums but suggestions didnt work, e.g. importing without vertex normals and in proper scale.

I think I'll have to scale the whole scene down and use that as a workaround.

Hi,
if your scale settings are incorrect or in extremely large scenes, you have to play with the rey epsilon value in the kernel settings
ciao beppe

Yep, this looks like a ray episolon issue.