Shadows and rigging

[Bentley Squeegee]

Hello folks, I have another two questions that I would be delted if someone could answer for me,

 

Firstly, Ground shadows, What is the best method for creating and baking these without a stupidly wide bleed effect whereby you can see the edges of the ground shadow as they are clipped, even after have a huge plane underneath in 3ds max?

 

and secondly, I am not sure if you know anything about the SL skeletal system and how it works in 3ds max, But i have been trying for the last week to change bone sizes so that I can create a bone structure for a quad legged creature, however if I change the size it completely messes up, I know its soemthing to do with a pivot point, but there are absolutely no tutorials detailing this and how to do it. I would greatly appreciate if you could shien alight on that too.

 

Best Regards

 

Bentley

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Bentley Squeegee wrote:

Firstly, Ground shadows, What is the best method for creating and baking these without a stupidly wide bleed effect whereby you can see the edges of the ground shadow as they are clipped, even after have a huge plane underneath in 3ds max?

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It depends on what you use as a lightsource above most things I think (and its position). Skylights for example give nice spread shadows, pointlights give a sharper shadow. If you use a shadow map which is a bit blurry or spread by nature, the thing I do is simply editing the outer edges in a graphical program like photoshop or gimp. For the few shadowplanes I've built this was my technique of choice. (skylight/shadow map/edit the baked texture)

Alternatively you could use a directional light with raytraced shadows which are a lot sharper. but this might not give the disired look. never did that for SL really. It should get rid of any bleed though.

Yet another thing you could do is baking the occlusion rather than shadows. Never did that for a single plane, but I guess the shadows will stay a lot closer to the object.