Hi,

Before I'll report to the Issue Tracker I'll post two shading/rendering issues I think are "major", albeit these show in Character Creator where rendering is not the final point. Nonetheless, these impact the way Characters look, so I think it is important enough to talk about these even before having confirmation (or not) with iClone 7 rendering. Your comments are welcome on this, of course.

(check this post for the second reported issue: [MajorIssue] Diffuse Has No Effect On Materials With Opacity Less Than 100)

The first one is that CC does not support transparent shadows, meaning that the Opacity channel and its settings (whether the global Opacity slider or the Opacity Map Channel) have weird impacts on shadows. But lets see that with some pictures:

1) For the illustration I've loaded the default nude female then added the long hair.


2) To better see the issue, disable the IBL and Rim lights.


3) Let crank up the Key light to 1.0 intensity and adjust the Shadow settings to something better than the default ones:


4) Now, lets reduce the Hair Opacity to 99. The diffuse effect disappears and this is part of the second issue I'll talk about in another post. I'm just reporting it so you can see there is already a problem here:


5) Now, lets reduce the Hair opacity to 1. The Hairs are near invisible but the shadows are still here, fully opaque:


6) Then if you reduce the Opacity from 1 to 0, the shadows completely disappear suddenly:


7) Same issue for the Eyelashes, Opacity to 1, still full opaque shadows:


8) Eyelashes Opacity to 0 and now the shadows suddenly disappear:


This is really a major issue as the look of the Characters is greatly impacted by the Hairs and Eyelashes Shadows transparency, and currently the only way to play with shadow transparency is through the main Shadow setttings, which is not what we want as we want the shadow fully opaque for non-transparent objects and surfaces. Especially now that we have PBR.

--
guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

Same thing happens in iClone 6 using the settings you suggest.



Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

@wires
Yes this issue is not new but I was waiting for the new PBR generation of iClone products to really insist on it, because now it is really critical.
One can't have PBR and still have these opacity issues either for shadows or diffuse (see the other post). I'm a bit surprised these have not been fixed yet.
That said, I'm curious to see if these are still present in iClone7 or if it just the remains of old rendering technology still in CC 2.0 beta.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

In CC 2 Beta, and in iClone 6.5 it is possible to remove the shadow by adjusting the "Shadow Threshold" from 0 to 2. This can be done for every material and can be adjusted to decrease the shadow with the opacity.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

@wires
Unfortunately this does not gives us transparent shadows, this is just an opacity threshold at witch the shadows will suddenly disappear, abruptly.
The idea is not to "remove" the shadows, but to progressively "fade" the shadows according to the shadow casting surface opacity.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

You'll have to adjust shadow opacity in the visual/shadow panel, but it's a global setting. The opacity and shadows still work as before, as you noticed. They are either on or off, and you can set the point where they switch with the threshhold.

I've mentioned these in my posts.
That's what I call a major issue. No transparent shadows following surface opacity.
See how ugly is the result on hairs.

The usual workaround (which really isn't) is to "remove" the shadow, throwing a lot of light to "mask" the issue. But then we can't have "realistic" shading here and PBR becomes moot.

Global shadow transparency is useless unless we could associate surfaces with lights (inclusive/exclusive) and the transparency would work per light. But we can't.

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guy rabiller | GOETZIWOOD STUDIOS
"N.O.E." (Nations Of Earth) Sci-Fi TV Show, Showrunner.

I just watched the iClone 7 pre-viz video and noticed that the shadows still have the flat mapped look.
I can't see any control for shadow softness or falloff or any of the issues mentioned in this post.
Without such shadow control/generation, PBR lighting can't be considered, well, PBR lighting.
MT

Hi MT, please refer to this post for softness function: https://forum.reallusion.com/308122/4-Color-Adjustments-Shadow-Effect