rendering shadows on plant objects

[richardavatar]

I have experienced an issue rendering with Renderworks in Landmark and wondered if anyone has worked through/ around this? The problem is that when using Renderworks plants do not have shadows cast across them, when to a certain extent they do in open GL. This is an issue as the scene then does not look very realistic. I understand that the reason for this is:

 

In OpenGL, the only parts of the Renderworks texture that is "active" is the color shader, which, in this case, is an image of a plant, and the transparency map, which knocks out the background of what is actually a rectangular image. Therefore, the shadows cast across the image, because there is nothing to stop them. 

However, when you use a Renderworks mode, the Renderworks software does all the work. In the case of plants, the texture also has a Reflectivity shader which makes it "glow" and emit light. The reason it does this is because the plants are actually two crossed planes of geometry. Renderworks calculates shadows much more accurately and without this glow, there would be a shadow cast where the two planes cross. 
If you dislike it, you could edit each plant's texture, edit the Reflectivity channel, and either reduce or remove the glow, but beware the shadow across the join on the crossed planes.

 

The problem with this is that it would be too time consuming to edit individual plant records and each scene may need different settings.

[Tamsin Slatter]

Unfortunately, there is no way (that I know) to mass edit Renderworks textures. It might be a nice enhancement request though.