I have an extruded text logo in front of a plane. I want to have the logo brightly lit yet still be able to control the amount of light on the wall. So I have a spot for the logo and an omni for the wall.

If I try to exclude the plane only from illumination from the spot, I lose the shadow from the text as well. However, I am able to keep illumination and exclude shadows. One works, one doesn’t.

I’m using shadow maps and the default renderer.

Help much appreciated. My $100 how-to book doesn’t mention anything on the subject.

The way the interface is setup for “include/exclude” in lights you can’t exclude one object from casting shadows and another object from illumination with the same light.

I think the solution is to make a copy of your light and setup the exclude/include for each one seperatly.

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— Image Technologies --
Modeling, Rendering Animation
http://www.imagetecmra.com
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Thanks.

I ended up using a third spot with 0.001 intensity, white shadow and -0.08 density to get what I want.

I still don’t get why I wasn’t able to exclude illumination only for the one object. It is a very simple scene. Two objects, one with shadows and illum. , the other with shadows and no illum.

Does this feature only work with certain renderers? I don’t recall ever getting either illum. or shadow only exclude/include to work.

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That’s the way it’s worked in Max/VIZ for as long as I’ve been using them.  I guess it’s just not a situation I had ever run across.

Glad you solved the problem.

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— Image Technologies --
Modeling, Rendering Animation
http://www.imagetecmra.com
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gwil 01 December 2007 03:29 AM

I have an extruded text logo in front of a plane. I want to have the logo brightly lit yet still be able to control the amount of light on the wall. So I have a spot for the logo and an omni for the wall.

If I try to exclude the plane only from illumination from the spot, I lose the shadow from the text as well. However, I am able to keep illumination and exclude shadows. One works, one doesn’t.

I’m using shadow maps and the default renderer.

Help much appreciated. My $100 how-to book doesn’t mention anything on the subject.

Glad to see you got the result you wanted.  I’ll explain why you were having problems, and give you an alternate solution.

When you take a light and exclude an object from casting shadows, that object will not block any light so anything beyond it will not show a shadow.  When you exclude that object from illumination, the object will not appear any brighter from that light, therefore will not show a darker area where a shadow is cast.

What i would do in your situation is self illuminate the material on the text, so it doesn’t need a light source to be bright.  Then you only need one light to cast the shadow.

Chris

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

Chris Medeck 07 December 2007 02:44 PM

gwil 01 December 2007 03:29 AM

Glad to see you got the result you wanted.  I’ll explain why you were having problems, and give you an alternate solution.

When you take a light and exclude an object from casting shadows, that object will not block any light so anything beyond it will not show a shadow.  When you exclude that object from illumination, the object will not appear any brighter from that light, therefore will not show a darker area where a shadow is cast.

What i would do in your situation is self illuminate the material on the text, so it doesn’t need a light source to be bright.  Then you only need one light to cast the shadow.

Chris

The problem with self-illuminated materials is that they tend to look flat and even.  This may not be the desired result.

I think his solution to use multiple lights was better.

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— Image Technologies --
Modeling, Rendering Animation
http://www.imagetecmra.com
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But if you look at his image, the text is a uniform color / brightness.  I agree that SI materials do look flat, but in this case it would work just fine.

3DS Max Design 2011 64-bit - Advantage Pack
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA