RW Styles: Quality settings for Blurriness & Soft Shadows

[Andy Broomell]

I've recently realized that I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a difference when changing the quality levels of either Soft Shadows or Blurriness from Low to Very High, for example. I always happen to also increase Anti-Aliasing when I'm doing final renderings, which seems to be the actual setting that smooths out shadows and blurriness. I mistakenly thought the Soft Shadows and Blurriness settings were the important factors, but today as I'm preparing to teach Renderworks Styles by going through settings one at a time, I've realized I can't make either of these quality levels do anything discernible. What do these two settings actually DO? Or is something broken?

 

 

 

 

Edited October 17, 2018 by Andy Broomell
Chasing down the problem...

[zoomer]

Interesting.

Looks like all Blurriness is meanwhile controlled by the AA Setting.

Which is common in other Renderers like VRAY too.

[Andy Broomell]

@Luis M Ruiz @Jim Wilson @Stephan Moenninghoff- any insight on this? Just curious if I'm doing something wrong, or if in fact we should only really pay attention to the AA setting in regards to shadows & blurriness.

 

Trying to make sure I teach this accurately two days from now 😄

[PVA - Admin]

Your findings line up with some things I've been seeing after more rendering work. I have not been able to make the Soft Shadows quality setting affect the end result at all.  Blurriness however, I think I see a difference when I had a blur applied to a transparency shader, (for things like privacy glass or ice,) but not for blurs applied to reflectivity. 

I do intend to track these down further, and I'll be able to devote more time to them after the Summit is over.

[Andy Broomell]

12 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

Blurriness however, I think I see a difference when I had a blur applied to a transparency shader, (for things like privacy glass or ice,) but not for blurs applied to reflectivity. 

 

Ah, I hadn't thought of testing it on a blurred transparency. I do see the difference there as well, thank you!

 

14 minutes ago, Jim Wilson said:

Your findings line up with some things I've been seeing after more rendering work. I have not been able to make the Soft Shadows quality setting affect the end result at all.

 

Thanks for confirming! I'm going to go with this for now.

[Stephan Moenninghoff]

Shame I will miss your talk! 

[Luis M Ruiz]

I have the feeling that we'll see differences depending on what type of light source we use: Spot, Point, Direct, HDRI, Heliodon. I am preparing a sample file and I'll post my findings

[Luis M Ruiz]

As promised, I tested the theory of light sources affecting the quality of Soft Shadows and, nope, I think I got the same conclusion, soft shadows quality seems to be driven by anti-aliasing. To me almost seems like soft shadows settings are not even needed. Here is my file.

test-soft shadows.vwx.zip

[Andy Broomell]

Thanks Luis!! Good thought about different types of light sources... since you came to the same conclusion, I wonder if this setting should be examined by the engineers? (i.e. fixed or even removed?)