Workflows For Ground Shadow Control — Explanation of Ground Settings?

Started by imprincevince, May 15, 2020, 11:29:40 PM

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imprincevince

Hi KS Forum!

Curious what people's workflows are with shadows.

Currently I'm doing Edit < Add Geometry < Add Ground Plane < Occlusion texture into the Shadow box and controlling from there + rendering out the shadow and object on their own layers [Will Gibbons posted a tutorial pretty recently on his workflow]. This has been my preferred way to get realistic, clean, editable shadows.

I am a bit confused on the "Ground" settings under "Environment". I've noticed I get different results depending on if the "Ground Shadows" box is checked or not under Environment < Settings. If I make "Ground Size" 1mm [as small as possible] and then turn on "Ground Shadows", the scene will actually be brighter than if "Ground Shadows" was unchecked.

To me, that seems a bit counterintuitive to turn on "Ground Shadows" but then your scene gets brighter.
  • Does anyone have the answer to what "Ground Shadows" actually does?
  • What is being calculated when you have "Ground Shadows" checked but also have a Ground Plane with Occlusion Shadow active?
  • What about "Occlusion Ground Shadows", what results are people liking from that?
+ attached a PNG of a MacBook from Apple's website with a clean, controlled shadow. The shadow darkens the bottom of the MacBook but is not necessarily darkening the entire scene. The shadow also ends before the edge of the page so that you can put the rendering on different colors, scale the size, move it around, etc [this is solved by Occlusion texture].

_V

richardfunnell

+1 - would love to hear some feedback from the dev team on this one :)

I've run into the same issue with Ground Shadows on/off and making the "Ground" super tiny, but would love to know *why* it behaves this way!


INNEO_MWo

Hello.


If you use the occulsion node into the opacity channel (ground material), then you should get no effect if ground shadow is on or off.

imprincevince

Bumping this thread again for new thoughts!

Quote from: INNEO_MWo on May 18, 2020, 10:51:50 PM
Hello.

If you use the occulsion node into the opacity channel (ground material), then you should get no effect if ground shadow is on or off.

Thanks for the comment, looking for a bit more detail into the calculations of ground shadows and best practices. There're a lot of options for ground shadows but I don't think I've seen a consistent / best practices approach.

1. Under your lighting environment check the "Ground Shadows" box
2. Check "Ground Shadows" box + add ground plane
3. "Ground Shadows" unchecked + add ground plane
4. "Ground Shadows" unchecked + add ground plane with Occlusion Shadow

+ additional question of how do you use "Image Style" when you have a ground plane in the scene? The adjustments you make also adjust the ground plane so you can't keep it pure white / transparent [even when you check the box for "Background Color"]

Quote from: richardfunnell on May 18, 2020, 05:22:53 PM
+1 - would love to hear some feedback from the dev team on this one :)

I've run into the same issue with Ground Shadows on/off and making the "Ground" super tiny, but would love to know *why* it behaves this way!

Hey Richard!

imprincevince


imprincevince

Bumping this again. Still haven't found a good workflow I like for shadows.

Another thing to add here. Having a sweep or some sort of wall / environment helps render objects a lot more realistically. The problem with a sweep is that you lose the transparent background [super common workflow given that you want transparent images to arrange in presentation slides and such].

So I'm finding myself building a lot of lighting environments... one that works with a sweep for renderings I want as realistic as possible and will get an entire slide page to itself and then an additional lighting environment with no background so I can get a transparent rendering that I can place and arrange around on a slide page. Thoughts?