Element 3D Spotlight Issue - Where is this shadow coming from?

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
February 15, 2023
2 replies
1299 views

Hi All,

I've spent most of the day trying to figure this out and come up empty.

I have a straightforward Element 3D composition with a floor plane, a spotlight, and a cube. If I move the spotlight beyond a certain point, there's a weird hard shadow line being cast by the spotlight and I have no idea why it's doing that. I've fiddled with the falloff values, shadow map sizes, different renderers, any E3D setting you can think of, and different comp sizes, but nothing. It doesn't do this with Ray Tracing shadows, but I would like to use the shadow maps for a number of reasons but seem unable to get rid of this line.

Where is this shadow, highlighted in red, coming from? I've also attached an AE file with an instance of E3D that illustrates the problem.

Please help!

Example_File.zip

Error or problem

This topic has been closed for replies.

Mylenium

Legend

Given your insane light cone angle, you are simply clipping the shadow map. It's a limitation of how this stuff works.

Mylenium

P

Pierre SteytlerAuthor

Participant

Thanks, but I don't understand what's insane about it. Even with the light position, point of interest, cone angle and everything else reset to default values, it still does it. And the shadow map is set to max.

How are you, for example, meant to cast a nice long shadow on a plane if this is what happens? Can you NOT use shadow maps? I'm just trying to understand this better.

Thanks for the help!

Shebbe

Community Expert

Shadow maps are textures that need to be calculated. There is a limit to how far into the distance these maps calculate for optimization reasons. It could be that the overal scale of your scene is too high. If scaling down doesn't work you'll have to use RT shadows instead but those are unfortunately always sharp in E3D.