i’ve placed a bridge in a scene - it sits in water with the ‘sun’ shining obliquely down onto it. shading/shadows underneath are super flat. i realize this area would largely be in shade but all of the shading /shadow is the same flat gray. how can i articulate these shadows? i’m using mental ray to render but feel as if it is limiting my options. any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

John

Post a reasonably sized image of your rendering so we can see what’s going on.  It can be very helpful.

Also, please tell us what your Indirect Illumination settings are.  For instance, do you have Final Gather enabled, how many bounces is it set to, and what are the values for it?  Are you using Global Illumination?

Flat shadows are often due to lack of bounced light.  In some cases, it’s easier to composite in an Ambient Occlusion pass or enable the AO built into the Arch & Design materials.

3ds Max Design 2012 64-bit - Subscription Advantage Pack / PU10
Dell Precision T5500, Dual Six Core Xeon X5650 @ 2.67GHz, nVidia Quadro 5000, 24 GB RAM, Win 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Minneapolis, MN, USA

I tried posting an image with that last - hopefully it worked this time.

Is mental ray the way to go?

Indirect Illumination settings - Final Gather is enabled, it is set to 0 bounces, any values are default, and Global Illumination is disabled…

Thanks so much…

	Attachment

Add a bounce or two, that will help. Yes, caustics would be nice comming from the water.
What materials and lighting are you using? The materials are not very convincing to me, are they standard? If so try some mr materials.

The lighting itself also looks rather flat to me & it looks like there’s no area/soft shadows.  I could be wrong but if I had to guess I’d say you were using something like a standard white light for the sun and a grey fill light instead of the more realistic mrSun/mrSky combination.

Jeff Patton
My Website | mental ray materials & blog

Hi, MR is the way to go. Just:

- turn ON global illumination (will give you a nice color bleeding)
- turn ON final gather (to refine the GI solution)
- turn ON caustics (to have those patterns underneath the bridge and underwater too)

You better read some MAX help/tutorials too because there are MANY parameters you’ll have to tweak till you get satisfied.

Cheers.

Q6600 @ 3.55Mhz / ATI 4850 1G DX9/ 8G RAM / 4 500G HD in RAID5 mode

Damn I’m good!