I've put two spots that are pointed back onto relatively flatish surface. When it renders it shows weird (to my uninformed eye) shadows as if some of the small surfaces had holes in them.
The shadows are above the “HMS Invincible” block, this geometry is made of a font SOP, extruded, then merged with a thin rectangle, the result of which is in turn placed into the main structure with a merge SOP. All of this is run through a facet SOP with cusping turned on.
Now I could turn off the shadows for the spots, but then the light “splashes” everywhere, as if it goes right through the geometry, which seems kind of weird, or maybe I'm just not understanding how lighting works?
1) Always render with shadows turned on for your spot lights. 2) To stop the letters of your ship casting a shadow go to the lights > shadow tab .In the shadow mask area you want to put * ^my_HMSS_Testgeometry_object .This then tells the lights to render shadows for all the geometry except for your text geometry. To find out more look up pattern matching in the help.
Thanks. The shadow mask only works on geometry objects, not SOP nodes, right? So in this case I'd need to take this chunk out of the current geometry object, make a new one, and put the relevant SOPs in place, and then exclude the new geo object.
