Does anyone have suggestions for emulating soft shadows?

Again, there are many working methods to simulate soft shadows using Imagine, try these:

Tips by Martin Keitel:

There is a trick that might work at least for rather simple objects (like spheres). Add the fakely-texture on your object so that it affects the filter. Adjust the parameters so that the object is fully transparent in the edges (255, 255, 255) and just a little in the middle (or not at all, if you want a dark shadow). Remove all the other textures to speed up rendering. Render in ray trace and you get a soft shadow. Oops! The object seems a little fuzzy. No problem. Now render the scene again so that there is only the object (or objects) that was changed. This time use the original object with it's proper textures. It will replace the fuzzy object, but the soft shadow will remain. It might be convinient to use layers in this...

Oh, I forgot to mention that when you render the scene again with only the shadow casting object, you must of course use the previous picture as backdrop image. Maybe you figured out this yourself. One more thing: Fakely-texture uses the angle between the object's surface and the viewpoint to determine the effect. So it really works fine for soft shadows only on round objects. Is there a texture that changes filter simply according to the distance from the object's axis? Ghost won't do, because it needs a fog object, and fog objects don't cast shadows.


Last Update: July 13, 1995
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