No Shadows

There are many situations in which it is perfectly acceptable to simply turn shadows off for a light. For example, if you are using a distant light as your key and you need a blue skylight fill but there are no areas in frame where a shadow would be cast, you can place a large area light for the fill and turn off shadows. The render will be much quicker and will still look fine. Also, if you wish to decrease your shadow density, using a light with no shadows provides you much, much more control than using ambient intensity to fill in the shadows. Of course, if you have all the render time in the world, just skip straight to Chapter 12 and start rendering with Monte Carlo radiosity set to 5 bounces.

You also have the option under Light Properties to turn off shadows only for particular objects and under Object Properties to turn off shadows only for particular lights. As you can see, there are many options and combinations when it comes to shadows.

I hope this chapter has successfully demonstrated the importance of accurate shadows as well as the flexibility of the tools available within LightWave. Later chapters deal with specific techniques and technique-building methods.

You should now have a good understanding of ray-traced shadows, shadow maps, and the effects of shadow size and softness and how they relate to the type of light source that creates them. As you will see in Part III, there are numerous ways to use lights with both ray-traced and shadow-mapped shadows.