I’m using terragen and the Ter2Blend script to import it into Blender and combine it with my temple environment; however, there are some problems which are occurring with the shadows on my terrain. If you open up the image i’ve included, you can see what i’m talking about from the notes. Some of the shadows are properly rendered while others seems to stop abruptly on the terrain making it look very splotchy. Below is some info on my setup, any ideas for those of you using Ter2Blend?
only lights are a spot light with buffer shadows and the lights in the houses which are lamps
shadow only material is setup with only shadow checked
I’m not really sure if much can be done about it, but I hope there’s a good solution. The tutorials online say that if I lower the opacity for the shadow-only material that it will lower the opacity for the shadows. This does work in that it fixes the “bad shadow” problem; however, lowering the opacity also lowers the opacity of the “good shadows”, so that’s also a problem. I wonder if there’s a clever way to set up some nodes to extract the shadow layer and get rid of the “bad shadows”, if not is there someone out there who knows enough about the blend2ter / ter2blend plugins to give me an idea about what I need to do next?
There is a way around this, and I did work it out (using I think it was 3 render pass’s) and did a test render that can be found here: http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=eSrdZETmT4s (that was a basic test, still had to tweak the lighting settings etc).
The bad news, I have lost all the files I used to create this, and the details of how I did it (I think it was on my old computer that crashed). I have lately wanted to get back into some of this, but have come up with a few issues. The new version of ter2blend seems to do some weird things with lighting, and I cant find the blend2ter script anywhere now!!!
Basically the way you have to do it is use layers and render a layer at a time:
layer 1: objects from terragen as shadow only, and not giving shadows. Any blender objects should not be rendered, but only cast shadows. This gets the shadows from blender objects onto the terrain.
layer2: objects in blender as shadow only and terragen objects as cast only. This will take the shadow from the landscape and cast it onto blender objects.
layer3: Render blender objects and the shadows cast between them.
Of course in the background you will have the exported image from terragen. This will work most of the time, not sure if there may be a few minor issues when various shadows overlap, but should be pretty good. In 3ds max there is a material called shadow matte which you would use for the terrragen landscapse, and just set its softness etc and all would be automatically done, but as far as I know there is nothing like this in blender.
So does anyone know where I can get a copy of blend2ter and maybe older versions of ter2blend? The copies on the blender projects server dont all seem to work.
