It seems that spotlights will only bake a hard edged shadow to the lightmap, the ‘shadow radius’ maxes out at 2 on spotlights. Is this how it should work, or is this a bug? Because directional lights max out at 90 on the ‘shadow radius’, which allows you to bake really soft, arealight-like shadows to the lightmap. I would really like to be able to do this with the spotlights as well. Is there anyway to force a spotlight to have a shadow radius of like 10 or 15, or any other way to a get a softer shadow baked to the lightmap from a spotlight?
I’ve been fiddling with this some and seems to me if you could somehow force the ‘shadow radius’ on a spotlight to go past 2 via a script, then you could get a nice blurred area light shadow from it.
Ive been looking through the Unity dll for any such variable can’t find it… is there anyway to get at this variable or even manually edit the lightmapping dialogue code?
A radius of 2 should be more than enough. Increase your samples, bounces ect. Beast emulates how lighting in the real world works. In reality, all light has a hard edge but shadows look soft because of the way light bounces off nearby surfaces.
You could also try using a cookie on the spotlight, if should carry over into beast but it’ll only soften the edges of the light, anything within the light casting shadows will have disproportionately firmer edges.
Lights in real life are usually area effects instead of infinitesimal points like you get in CG. With a CG light, an edge is either occluded or not, which is why you normally get totally sharp shadows (“soft” shadows are really just an image effect). In real life an edge is partially occluded because some of the light casts a shadow and some of it doesn’t. You can emulate area lights by using a lot of lights spread over a small area, with a correspondingly lower intensity for each one. This is how area lights work in Blender, for example.
–Eric
I know that Beast itself has area light functionality integrated into it. I assume UT did not implement it because area lights would not smoothly mix with the harder edges of realtime deferred lighting shadows. But I really do think they should implement it just in case someone wants to bake down an area light.
I’ve encountered something really odd though. If you make a spotlight and add a shadow radius of 2 and bake it, the shadow will come out at a certain smoothness. Then if you scale your whole scene down by .1 then bake again, the shadow will bake like an area shadow! The softness of baked shadows from spotlights is dependent on scene scale? What is the proper scale to use then? Is there any issues with using a scene scale that is smaller than it should be in order to allow for wider soft shadow from spotlights? I read in the Unity manual that its important to retain proper scene size for Beast to work properly. But do any of you know what exactly will change or what is sacrificed if you use an improper scene size? I come from a background in Mental Ray in which scene size does not matter at all, final gather and all of it’s functions just adapt to what scale the geometry is. Is Beast final gather like this too? Or is maintaing a proper scene scalle absolutely necessary?
And Cameron, when I say softness on a shadow, I’m not refferring to how dark a shadow is, but rather how sharp the edges are. Perhaps I should be saying sharp edged shadows instead of soft shadows.
Tried editing the Beast xml file? Has extra options in that.
But thats only for like, the render settings of the whole scene. Can you make an xml file to attach to individual spotlights?
as far as I’m aware you can only impact the global settings