Hi. I'm learning Houdini and have problems with shadows in mantra and rman.

1. How can I increase quality (resolution) of filter shadows?
Why “shadow softness” doesn work for filter or fast shadows?

2. Any ideas how to make shadow maps for rman in Houdini?

thanks in advance

1.

In mantra, filter or fast shadows use ray tracing. The quality will be determined by the shading rate and by the number of antialiasing samples that are taken. You can control the number of ray samples on the mantra output driver by selecting “decouple ray sampling” and increasing the ray samples.

The shadow softness controls the way that shadow map lookups are performed (it increases the derivatives, so that more pixels in the map are filtered). This is not supported for ray tracing, but you might be able to get a similar result with area lights.

2.

Shadow map generation for renderman should work the same way that it does for mantra. Go to the light object, and set the resolution on the “viewing” tab and turn on depth map generation in the “shadow” tab. Then make sure you use a light/shadow shader that uses your generated shadow maps.