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Shadows only lights

marcoiomarcoio Posts: 45
in Daz Studio Discussion

A curiosity: all tutorial about using specular only lights say that Shadow Type has to be set to Deep Shadows Map. Why activating shadows, regarded that specular only lights don't seem throwing shadows? And why using Deep Shadows Map instead of Raytraced?

Comments

  • SimonJMSimonJM Posts: 5,999

    I suspect it's to have a minimal impact on render speed ... however, when I add in specular only lights they tend to be parented to anoteer light that is shadow casting anyway and so I don't have the spec only light be shadow casting at all.  Raytrace shadow casting speed has been greatly improved in the more recent versions of 3Delight so using DSM may be a false economy.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    SimonJM said:

    Raytrace shadow casting speed has been greatly improved in the more recent versions of 3Delight so using DSM may be a false economy.

    Flipping to Progressive ON in render options enables the 'raytrace hider' (3Delight speak for a faster raytracing renderer).  Raytrace shadows are, in most 11.x builds (Studio uses versioon 11 or newer) much faster than DSM.  That doesn't take into account  the bug that has been present in DSM shadows for years...the usually magenta 'sparks' that often crop up.

  • KhoryKhory Posts: 3,854
    marcoio said:

    A curiosity: all tutorial about using specular only lights say that Shadow Type has to be set to Deep Shadows Map. Why activating shadows, regarded that specular only lights don't seem throwing shadows? And why using Deep Shadows Map instead of Raytraced?

    I'm going to mention that 3dl has a long term (and at this point I suspect never to be fixed) bug where using shadow maps can lead to odd fire fly  (actually large blotches of color) in the scene. If the tutorials are older they would have said shadow maps to speed things up, but needing to do that has not been true for years now.

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    Khory said:
    marcoio said:

    A curiosity: all tutorial about using specular only lights say that Shadow Type has to be set to Deep Shadows Map. Why activating shadows, regarded that specular only lights don't seem throwing shadows? And why using Deep Shadows Map instead of Raytraced?

    I'm going to mention that 3dl has a long term (and at this point I suspect never to be fixed) bug where using shadow maps can lead to odd fire fly  (actually large blotches of color) in the scene. If the tutorials are older they would have said shadow maps to speed things up, but needing to do that has not been true for years now.

    Nope, not going to be fixed.  In fact the devs of 3DL have been recommending against DSM for quite a while now.

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