Hard Shadows by jitspoe

Finally in!

This filter is much welcome - I will return with further comments when I understand what the heck is going on in there - good work!

Variation #1 looks pretty realistic, and variation 6 reminds me of some old filters I was making a year or two ago, making *fake* shadows for a 3-D look without using the HDR lighting mode. Cool stuff.

jffe

Sure, why not? Too bad it takes like an hour to render, and the mountains are a bit rough, so the shadows are all spiked. I'm tempted to make a shadow-friendly satellite filter now.

are you rendering it on top of the diffuse map or the already surface-lit product of the satellite? But I can see that it doesn't look as great as I had imagined. Try a more "solid" terrain? Wait I can do this, why am I ordering you to haha

it's a little hard to tell where the shadows are but when you look closely it actually looks pretty good.

btw you inspired me to create your anti-filter, ambient occlusion

Aww, thought editing would allow me to attach 2 images. Here's the lowered heightmap version:

I modified your filter to accept already-AO'd images, color the light source, and control exposure. My ambient occlusion filter is used on the image/height initially, saved then used the result as the image into your filter, using the same height map, where I have your filter generate it's stuff and simply use an add component to combine the two. Pretty good huh? I love Qbert.

Yeah I think that's due to jpeg compression artifacts or something, but then again it gives it a little realistic feeling hehe

Funny you mention that. I made my own filter to do AO to save render time, but then I combined them because the light math was actually incorrect, and my AO filter was really fast (2 seconds for a full 1080p image). It looks better now and is about 50x more convenient hahaha. I'm working on an "export HDR" filter that clamps all positive values to 0-1. That's the easy part ( x/sqrt(x^2 + 1) ), but I need a formula that will reconvert those numbers into their original HDR values.

Amazing and awesome effect, realistic and well done, very Interesting and useful!!

Love much how the lighting and shadows can be configured and are well done according to the source.

Also like that it has been included a lot of sources to try it on.

Thanks very much and congratulations for the idea

That "dithering" is Ambient Occlusion. Change AO settings from draft to low/medium or anything. Custom settings can help with getting optimum results.

Getting the hang of FF?

You can also adjust the AO settings to make it darker without adjusting the surface height, as modifying the surface height also alters the other light behavior (though it's a bit more subtle here, since most of the lighting is coming from the script, not FF).

To be honest, I think the taller surface height makes the AO shadows look too excessive and unnatural, but it depends on what you're using it for.

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jitspoe modifying the surface height also alters the other light behavior To be honest, I think the taller surface height makes the AO shadows look too excessive and unnatural, but it depends on what you're using it for

Yes, sorry that I did not say anything about this, I have seen as you say that with higher surface height the shadow becomes much more stronger, and I agree with you that the example above can be too excessive and you could modify the lighting so is not so hard and strong, I just wanted to make it strong in that example and did not modify it so you could clearly see the difference between both.

Here I have done a better example showing a less excessive shadow and with a similar lighting intensity of the original still using a high surface height BUT also rising the Brightness and Black Point, also is important to change the AO to High so it looks good.

And As said before, for me it looks better the one with higher surface height and added brightness than the default preset 5, but of course, as you said, it depends for what you want and what effect you really want to get.

Another alternative


If you are not happy with the direct result from FF, you can also modify easily the lighting with Photoshop or any other similar graphic software.

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Sharandra you could also render out the AO map instead of baking it in, and then blend it over the image in Photoshop.

Yes, this could be possible too as an alternative

Honestly wouldn't know when you would have a situation needing that parameter. haha Feels like just a good option to have anyway.

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Yes, this could be possible too as an alternative

It should be standard practice giving yourself legroom to tinker results. Just that I kinda get lazy and don't bother with layers. You then later realize "oh god, it's too dark" so you wanna change it but then you gotta re-render the whole thing.

Designer life tip 928: Always render passes, it saves time.