Vray Area Shadow Tutorial

The VRayShadow plug-in can be used to achieve raytraced shadows with standard 3ds Max lights and VRay.   In addition to supporting blurry or area shadows, they will also cast correct shadows from objects with VRay displacement, as well as from transparent objects.  In this post you will learn about vray area shadow tutorial.

We have one example on how to get some nice area shadow. Be carefull using this shadows because render time are gonna go up. We are going to  start with a simple scene, here you can download it: Link

If you render this you’ll get :

No shadows have been applied here.
Now, i have my render settings high enough for this scene. so we can add shadows.
Turn on shadows and choose Vray Shadows.

You can see we have shadows, but also you can see the shadows are very sharp!
So if you want soft edged shadows turn on the Vray Area shadows.
Below are two example of area shadows.
First on is 20×20×20 next one is 50×50×50

Finally if you want less noise in your shadows turn the subdivs up. In the last example it is  used 100×100×100 with 32 subdivs. But beware: if you turn the subdivs higher your rendertime will increase  a lot, so if you use lower values it renders quicker. If you use higher subdivs the rendertime will increase but also does quality.

A quick look at the vraysun:  You can get also some nice soft shadows with this light.

The shadows are a combination of the ZHeight of the Sun, and the Size mulitplier.
In this example of size multiplier is at 40. The noise is caused by having only 8 subdivs.  So if you would set this to 32 you’ll get smoother shadows, but also higher rendertime.
Also the shadowbias is 0, this value moves the shadow toward or away from the shadow casting object.

We hope this vray area shadow tutorial help you to understand this marvelous plugin of vray.

Source: www.pixelstudio.nl

Tags: 3DSMAX, area shadow, arquigrafico.com, blurry shadow, noisy shadow, render, shadows, VRAY, vray area shadow, vray cast shadow, vray shadow, vray shadow tutorial