[thom]

a few questions for Maya users:

Is there any way to get real-time shadows in Maya? Sketchup does a great job of quickly giving you openGL cast shadows while you move around a model. I prefer and am familiar with [old versions of] Maya and really want that feature. Has it been incorporated into version 8?

[balistic]

For shadows:

In your active viewport, go to Lighting > click Use All Lights. Then hit the lighting menu again and click Shadows.

Unfortunately, realtime shadows in Maya look like shit, and cause a huge drop in viewport performance, at least in Maya 7 on a consumer graphics card. Maybe they've improved them in 8.

I've been lighting shots in Maya every day for three years and I've never used the real time shadows. Easier to just do an IPR.

You can also visualize what your shadows will look light by looking through the lights themselves. Select a light and then in your viewport go to Select > Look Through Selected.
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brian.prince|light.comp.paint

[thom]

balistic - thanks - awful stairstepping and it will only see depth map shadows. i can live with the performance drop but not the shadow quality. it takes 10 times longer to ipr render every possibility even with limited geometry. sketchup is gold for that purpose, even with a lot of geometry, but has limited capabilities otherwise.

[Affected]

Maybe you could write your own shadow shader for your groundplane or whatever the shadows are being cast on for that, one that inserts the shadow into the diffuse attribute of the shader? I'm pretty sure that should be possible given maya's flexibility, but could get pretty involved... And cpu-intensive too, I suppose. There's a chance someone's done that already though.

[Affected]

Actually, if I understand your purpose correctly, just baking the shadows into a texture map would be enough? I think there's a more advanced way to do that in maya, but you could just give the shadow-casting object a suitable shader that will render it invisible while still casting shadows, render from a camera that gives you a view of the entire scene and project the result back onto your shadow-receiving objects from the same camera. Then enable high quality preview for your viewport, revert your shadow-casting object's material to what you want it to be, and you should get better results.

[Mikko K]

Affected> baking the shadows sounds like too much kludge for this purpose.

[thom]

Affected - interesting ideas, but sounds really involved. I just want maya to do what sketchup will do - Sketchup has real-time shadows that move and cast as you drag the light source around, dial the time of day on a slider, rotate your model, or move around via the camera. It's a super quick way to look for interesting lighting scenarios.

[Affected]

gh, I should pay attention sometimes... Yea, if you want to move lights the bake idea won't work. The shader should, but it would take a bit of work, or a damn lot if you aren't already pretty comfortable with maya's scripting etc.

edit: actually, I'm not sure the shader would work either, I don't know if maya updates the preview textures all the time... Would probably be slow.