I am looking for a way to get the best natural shadow for characters with cycles.
I now use emission planes and disable diffuse and add a lamp point above the character to get more sharp shadows then with diffuse. But actually the shadow lines are now to sharp and diffuse only is not a good shadow.
It needs a lot of practice to get good natural lightning with Cylces .
Use emitting materials (with shadow and diffuse visibility ON) or area lights. These act like real world lights, and thus give natural lighting. Point lights do not. (I’d advise against ever using points lights, personally. Same with spots). The rest is just basic real-world lighting. To get sharper shadows, make the light smaller or further away. For softer shadows, move the light closer or make it bigger. Hit google or the library and grab some info on photography and set lighting. It’s all in sizing and placement, really.
Thanks do you have an example of emitting materials ?
do not quite understand and google me drowsy
He means you have to assign a Emitter material to an object.
For example, take a plane a give it an emission value.
then you can modify the strenght and the colour and stuff…
you’ll get something like this:
I am using emission planes already