Clouds with shadows but not casting shadows?

[xnasorcerer]

Is there a way for me to have clouds with shadows, but not to cast shadows on terrains also? Also, look at these shadows on the terrain. Why do they look like that?

Thanks

[dhavalmistry]

what was the render quality of this one?

[xnasorcerer]

what was the render quality of this one?

Detail = 1
Anti-aliasing = 3

[dhavalmistry]

I have no idea about the shadows then...try increasing the atmo samples (I dont think it will do any good).

also play with GI a little

[Virex]

My guess woduld be that your clouds are very dense. As you can see, they're almost pitch-black. Not much light get's trhough that. But my guess would be that higher G.I. settings would lighten it up a bit.

[Mr_Lamppost]

I don't know why it should affect the shadows and not the actual clouds but changing the acceleration cache setting may help.  just a guess 

[Tangled-Universe]

You can easily disable shadowcasting of the clouds on terrain by going to your cloud shader and tick off "enable secondary".

The reason why the shadows look like this is probably because you either use soft shadows and/or because the light is being diffused/scattered and thus not creating the same look like the clouds. Well, that's my idea, not sure whether this is true or not.

Martin

[xnasorcerer]

You can easily disable shadowcasting of the clouds on terrain by going to your cloud shader and tick off "enable secondary".

The reason why the shadows look like this is probably because you either use soft shadows and/or because the light is being diffused/scattered and thus not creating the same look like the clouds. Well, that's my idea, not sure whether this is true or not.

Martin

Well, by last night I found that using the soft option works fine.  Thanks.

ABout the "enable secondary" option... Well, if I disable that, the clouds will loose their own shadow, and that is not what I want. I want the clouds to have that dark part on the low side of them, but not to cast shadow on the terrains. I don't know if we can do this with the software, but it could be, perhaps another feature to have.

Thanks

[joshbakr]

I'm no expert but I don't think disabling shadows or disabling secondary atmo will help. Like you said you will lose detail in the clouds themselves. What looks strange to me is mostly the shape of the shadows on the terrain as they look squared and don't match the shape of the clouds? Could just be a bug with this particular TGD?  I'm also wondering if this has something to do with the altitude of the clouds as they appear to be very high altitude? Just a few thoughts. I'm sure one of the Planetside staff will have the answer though.

[Mr_Lamppost]

I did a test and while I don't know how to remove the cast shadows I can confirm that the blocky shapes are caused by the Acceleration Cache, You will find the Acceleration Cache under the cloud layer quality settings. 

I set the cloud density value quite high (100).  For the first image the Acceleration Cache is set to the default Optimal.

For the second image the Acceleration Cache was set to None; this doubled the render time.

The tgd is included if anyone wants to check the results

[Oshyan]

Correct, the acceleration cache can cause shadow problems with clouds of high density.

I don't think there's a way to turn off shadows of clouds *just* on the terrain unfortunately. Certainly that kind of flexibility is sometimes useful and it's something we can look at in the future.

- Oshyan

[lonewolf]

The sky also looks 'cleaner' in the second image. Pity about the double render time though. 

[Mr_Lamppost]

The sky also looks 'cleaner' in the second image. Pity about the double render time though. 

I noticed that but put it down to the well known inconsistent GI problem.