Rendering Shadows In Anim8or

(Beginner)

By Adam Maier (aka Hihosilver)

This tutorial was written by me a while ago.  It illustrates how to render images with shadows as well as antialiasing.  It’s a simple tutorial and shows you the difference between different forms of shadows.  This tutorial only illustrates the differences in the scanline raytracer and excludes the ART raytracer as it was written before that was out.

This tutorial requires that you already know how to use the basic tools in Anim8or.  I recommend you first read about scenes HERE in the manual.

1. Go to Scene mode by going “Mode>Scene”

2. Go “Build>add object…” and choose the object you want to add

3. Move around, rotate and resize your object to get the angle you want for your model in the camera view (”view>camera”)

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 as necessary. You can add as many objects into your scene as you want, whether it be the same object or a different one.

Now I’m going to get a little more complicated, to teach you about using lights and shadows.

5. Now you want to add lights. You can add as many as these as you want. To add a light you go “Build>Add light…” You then get a popup window. In this window you can do many things, such as changing the color or intensity of the light (the darker the color you choose, the less intense the light will be.) Down near the bottom is the “fixed properties” box. This shows the three different kinds of lights. The first is “infinite”. This is basically a light acting as something like the sun. It emits light in one direction over the entire scene. The location of this light does not matter, but the angle will change the angle the light comes from. The second type of light is “Local”, this is like a light bulb. Light emits from the center of this light in all directions. The angle of this light does not matter, but the location does. The last type of light is “spotlight”. It is, as the name says, a spotlight. It doesn’t act exactly as a spotlight would in real life but it still does the job. For this light, the angle and position both matter. Multiple lights are always good. For a basic render, I normally use a few infinite lights to light up the scene and one local light to act as the main light. many people do it differently though and have better renders, so don’t exactly follow what I do. Play around with light positions, intensities and render it to test it out.

6. This leads to rendering the scene. So after adding your lights, you go “Render>Render Image…” This will bring up a dialog box. In this dialog box you want to check “antialiased”, this will make your render smooth and not pixelated on the edges. You can change the width and height of your render, as well as the background color. You can also change the scene color before rendering by going “settings>environment” you then make sure “solid” is checked (if you want a solid background), and you can change the color. In the render window after choosing your options you would press “ok” and the image will render. it should go fast, unless you have shadows. You can then press the “Save” button on the left and choose where you want to save and the type of file (Normally you want to save as a .jpg, as people don’t appreciate you posting .bmp images.)

7. To get out of the render window you would press the “close” button the left. Now I’ll teach you to render with shadows. First you want to specify which objects cast and receive shadows. If you have a ground object other than the ground grid, you don’t want the object to cast shadows, as this will slow down your render a TON. Casting shadows means that when a light hits the object, the object will create shadows. Receiving shadows means that shadows from other objects or the same object will show up on the object. For basic objects you normally want both checked. To do this you double click any objects you want to cast/receive shadows, and near the bottom of the dialog box there is a “shadows” section. In this section you can check/uncheck casts and/or receives.

8. Next you want the lights to create shadows. Not all of your lights have to create shadows as they slow down the render time, but it’s more realistic if they do. To do this double click any lights you want to cast shadows, press the “advanced” button near the bottom. You would then check “Casts Shadows”. You may then want to change the other properties. To get realistic shadows you want to change the “Percent Dark” to 100. The basic shadows are “volume” shadows. They don’t have soft edges, the edges are hard straight lines. The problems are not only not being soft, but they are glitchy as well. To change the type of shadow you press the “Ray Trace” shadow button, and check “soft”. You now get more options. First you can either choose “ordered” or “monte carlo” shadows. Monte carlo shadows are grainier but people feel are a bit more realistic.  It depends what style you’re going for.

Here are examples of what I’ve been talking about

Render with “Antialiasing” turned off

Volume Shadows with 100 “percent dark”

Volume Shadows with 50 “percent dark”

Ordered Shadows with 10-20 “Size”

Ordered Shadows with 50-70 “Size”

Monte Carlo Shadows with 10-20 “Size”

Monte Carlo Shadows with 50-70 “Size”

9. After changing your light properties you can render the image as you did before in step 6. The render will take longer with ray traced shadows but the shadows make the image much nicer.

10. Most of this requires practice which is basically messing around with things and seeing what works and what doesn’t. So play with all that you’ve learned and render away!