Hi, quick question here…
Is there a way to make the volumetric shadows in blender more vivid?
I have tried fiddling with the shadow settings, lamp & halo intensity but I either get dull shadows or way too much light (which ends up seriously clipping the values).
The compositor nodes can raise the contrast of the whole scene allowing me to make the shadows darker, but it affects the whole scene.
edit - see attached pictures.
thanks.
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Kevin
I was just struggling with the same thing. Try using the nodes in RC1. “Burn” the shadow pass back into the combined result. In the top right window you can see the result of the B4 and after of this technique via a split viewer node (aint CVS great?). As you can see, the shadows in the blue halo spot are very weak while those in the red spot are dramatically darkened, but the contrast of the geometry has not been effected (well, there is a SLIGHT difference, but it is negligable). In my case I needed to alter the contrast of the geometry in the opposite direction so I did so with the specular pass and a color ramp which I then “Added” back on top of the burn. You can see the render result in the lower right corner. For this to work though, you’ll need to light the side of the geometry that’s facing the camera so that it does not self shadow, else the burn will severely effect it because you’ll burn it’s own shadow in. You can always render out a seperate shadow pass for the geometry and overlay it ,after the burn, if you need to darken it back down.
Thanks! I was hoping there was a simpler way, but I guess yours is actually not tricky.
In the real comp I am working on the front of the object is lit. The above picture was just a halo example. If the CVS has shadow pass output that should work, it’s just I have had RC1 crash too much to use for this project (pro work on a short timeline).
The deadline will probably force me to use LightWave, but I will continue to experiments with your solution so thank you.
If anyone knows of a way in Blender 2.42 to fix this that would be great because I really like doing all my work in Blender 
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Kevin
Well, it does crash a lot but as someone pointed out to me it is mostly from impatience. I knew this but I finally decided to cut it out when that person mentioned it and developed a better work ethic. Now I’m sailing along smoothly. It still crashes on occasion but that’s less than 1/10 of what it was B4. Saving your work helps too but that’s just good practice with any program.
Nope, it’s one of the more straight forward processes for image correction that I’ve found using the nodes, but you wouldn’t have wanted to be here while I endured hours of assanine, self induced agony while trying to figure out the best way to get the job done. I felt like a monkey.
RC1 is working VERY well for me!
Have you tried simply turning up the halo step value more? In my experience this has made the shadows of volumetric halos darker…
Yeah, Halo step helps but it starts to degrade the shadow as we all know. For now that tip will definitely help me out so thank you!
RC1 is fine as long as you don’t go crazy (something I like doing because blender is so insanely fast for me!) like RamboBaby said. I blame XP, but more often then not it really comes down to user error. Unfortunately I need to get comps in tomorrow for review.
However, using the shadow pass (hehe… I am so glad I get to say that now!) will be fine for the final comp (after this one) so thank you sooooo much for figuring that out for me
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Kevin
Sorry Kevin, I figured that one out for my self. You just happened to hobble on in at the right time.
Oh, so sorry… correction:
Thanks so much for sharing your discoveries! It will be really helpful.
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Kevin
