Hi,

1. I was wondering how you get depth map shadows to look good? When I use them on my shattered geometry they look horrible with chunky edges but the raytraced shadows look clean, they're just a bit too sharp sometimes.

2. Also how do you fix flickering geometry & shadows on shattered geometry? or in any case?

A few things you can try:

1. Make sure that your light casting depth map shadows is framing your object well so it fills the frame. In other words when you look through the light make sure there is not a lot of empty space around the subject.

2. Increase your map's resolution. Try a 1k (1024x1024) resolution to start. I wouldn't go above 2048x2048 unless you are rendering some seriously high res images.

3. Increase your pixel samples. I find 3x3 is usually enough.

4. Increase your shadow quality.

5. Increasing shadow softness will feather the shadows edges.

Adjusting these parameters should fix any chunky edges and flickering with shadow maps. Don't adjust everything all at once, making a few small adjustments usually works wonders and there is no point adding unnecessary render time by using very high values when they are not needed.

It should also be noted that Houdini uses deep shadow maps by default which are different than depth map shadows because they consider transparency. You can turn this off using the “Transparent Shadows” toggle in the parameters.

Thank You very much.

Any tips for cleaning up broken geometry?

It's best to post your geometry or images of it so we know what's broken with it.

Cheers!
steven

Yeah, that's a pretty ill-posed question. “clean” can mean many things here.

Ok. If you shatter extruded text for example. How to you make it look like it's cleanly assembled whilst really being fractured ready to smash?

Use two instances of the geometry (fractured and not fractured). Plug them into a switch node and at the point of impact/shattering or whatever you can swap them. Use an expression the in Select Input field of the switch node. $F == whatever frame you want the shatter to occur. e.g. $F == 20

You can also download the file attached on this post and take a look inside the AutoDopNetwork to see how the switching could potentially be done in the dynamics network.

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=6257&view=findpost&p=46575 [forums.odforce.net]