Shadow Casting

Checking the Shadows check box in the Light Editor of a light that supports shadows (Point, distant, spot, sky, sun, projector and goniometric) result in the selected light casting shadows in the scene. Shadows will only be visible in photorealistic renders; unless you are using a Hardware accelerated OpenGL 1.5 compliant graphics card, in which case you can preview Interactive Shadows . See the section called "Presenter Options" in the chapter called "Display Model" of the JetStream Roamer book for details on how to display interactive shadows and lighting.

Note

Enabling shadows on lights should be given due consideration. If you turn on shadows on all lights, then you may find the effect very confusing and somewhat un-natural, especially if there are many lights in a small scene. This will also have an affect on performance, during navigation and general refreshing of the navigation window. You may wish to consider only enabling shadows on a few strategically positioned lights, to create the effect you require.

In addition to choosing which lights in your scene will cast shadows, you may also select which items in the scene should cast a shadow. Each item in the scene has its own shadow casting option.

The available shadow casting options available for an item, are:

Off . Choose this to disable shadows. The selected item will not cast a shadow from any light source.
On . Choose this to enable shadows. The selected item will cast a shadow from any light source that has >shadows enabled.
Inherit . Choose this to inherit the shadow casting option from the parent item. i.e. the selected item will use the same option as the item directly above it in the Selection Tree path (see the section called "Selection Tree" in the chapter called "Selecting Items" in the JetStream Roamer book for more information on the selection tree and its structure). For example, if you turn shadow casting On for a Group and the Geometry contained within that Layer is set to Inherit , then the Geometry will cast shadows also, as it inherits the On option from its parent (the Group).

Note
If all items in the scene are set to Inherit then the default setting is On

To set an items shadow casting option:

Right click on an item in the scene, select Presenter from the context menu and then choose the >shadow casting option you require.

Note
The item selected will depend on your Selection Resolution setting. See the section called "Selection Resolution" in the chapter called "Selecting Items" in the JetStream Roamer book for more information.

Right click on an item in the Selection Tree (see the section called "Selection Tree" in the chapter called "Selecting Items" in the JetStream Roamer book for more information), select Presenter from the context menu and then choose the >shadow casting option you require.