A twist on soft shadows

Artwork Blender Tests
#1

Hey all, I’ve lurked around the forums quite a bit and I thought I’d register. Anyways, I’ve been playing around with soft shadows in Blender, and came up with a rather neat way to create soft shadows that allows for full 360 degree shadows, and little setup. (And I don’t think there are any posts on this method) Here’s an image and blend to show you.

And the steps:

  1. Create a lamp, and activate the shadows.
  2. Create a box, or sphere (Make sure the object is small. A scale of .1 works fine). Parent the lamp to the object.
  3. Make the object an emitter, and turn on the static emitter. Set the amount to however many samples you want the emitter to emit, and turn the steps to 100. Otherwise you’ll have strands of lights.
  4. Turn on the Dupliverts, and go back to the lamp and divide the energy by the samples.
  5. Render.

I know that this can be done with the area lamp, but unfortunately it can only light anything that it’s facing, and the lamp’s rather difficult to control.

http://indreams-studios.com/g_dragon/softshadow.blend

Enjoy :slight_smile:

Attachments

softshadow0001.jpg800×600 28.9 KB

#2

If you’re talking about dupliverted spotlamps at all then I’m afraid that trick has been found a long time ago.

I don’t see why one can’t use area lamps. For this picture you could use 6 area lamps to simulate an omni lamp.

#3

yeah, but good area light shadows take forever to render…

#4
  1. Make the object an emitter, and turn on the static emitter. Set the amount to however many samples you want the emitter to emit, and turn the steps to 100. Otherwise you’ll have strands of lights.

A particle emitter? Dont bother, just use dupliverts if you are going to.

#5

Problem with dupliverts is you don’t have the same control that you’d have over particles. For example, if you wanted the light to emit 16 samples, then you’d have to model the object with 16 samples. With using particles, you have that control. Plus, I tested to see if a force would affect the lamps, and it didn’t.