Shadows

[Lady of the Lake]

Really elementary question for most of you but I am struggling with this.   How do I get rid of the dark shadows on my terrain that are caused by the clouds.   I tried a couple of things but it just messed up my cloud color big time.   Thanks for any help.

[WAS]

Well it's hard to get rid of shadows like that because the sun is behind the clouds, creating said shadow. There currently is no option to disable shadows. You could try to add a invisible light source below the clouds in front of the sun and crank the settings to match the sun with glow in atmosphere kept off.

[j meyer]

Something worth a try is 2D Shadow mapping.
Clouds ->optimisation tab.

[Lady of the Lake]

Thanks for the suggestions.

I tried messing with the second light source.  Didn't get far...probably my lack of skills.

As to the 2D shadow mapping.....all I see under the Cloud, Optimisation tab is choices for acceleration cache.   ( I only have TG3 Creative)  What am I missing?

[j meyer]

Sorry,I didn't think of the different versions of TG,my fault.

[Upon Infinity]

You could increase the scene.so GI and put more light into your shadows.

[Oshyan]

You can't control the shadows of *just* the clouds at present. You can try disabling Cast Shadows of Atmosphere in the Sunlight node, though this will have a more global and significant effect. But you may be able to compensate for it with other changes. Similarly/alternatively you could try turning off Enable Secondary in your cloud layer(s). This will remove self-shadowing from the clouds as well as cloud shadows on the ground. You may be able to compensate for the lack of self-shadowing by darkening the clouds or something. Admittedly these solutions are not ideal though.

- Oshyan

[bobbystahr]

Really elementary question for most of you but I am struggling with this.   How do I get rid of the dark shadows on my terrain that are caused by the clouds.   I tried a couple of things but it just messed up my cloud color big time.   Thanks for any help.

Have you tried Soft Shadows on the Sun with a huge radius? Might work.

[Lady of the Lake]

Bobby, that did it!!!!! I put the diameter of the soft shadows at 150.....and zip, the bad shadow was gone.   I will go back and take the number down some to see where the best is, but that sure worked.

Thanks to you and to all who answered.

Lyla

[bobbystahr]

Bobby, that did it!!!!! I put the diameter of the soft shadows at 150.....and zip, the bad shadow was gone.   I will go back and take the number down some to see where the best is, but that sure worked.

Thanks to you and to all who answered.

Lyla

Happy that was helpful...j meyer recommended that to me a while back and it worked for me so I thought it'd be good for you as well.

[Tangled-Universe]

Soft shadows with such a radius is a very bad idea, I'm afraid.

Not only is it unrealistic, but such a radius would also require quite a lot soft shadow samples to get reasonably noise free results.
(even default 0.5 requires >25 samples for smooth shadows on a flat white surface, so imagine)

The reason the shadows of your clouds are so dark is likely because of the cloud density.
Reducing cloud density should give lighter shadows from those clouds on the ground.