Edges cast shadows...?
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Here's one for the Guts Gurus: If I set all the edges on my trees not to cast shadows, am I freeing up resources or just giving SU more to think about?
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I think by default edges is not set to cast shadows anyway. But you hide your edges in the trees, don't you? In that case they wouéldn1t cast shadows either.
Now instead of talking about OT, I should concentrate on the Q whether it frees up resources... IMO displaying shadows cast from edges should tax the system as well as other shadows so no shadows should be better. But this is mere speculation on my side I have to confess.
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Exactly, Gai, and what I assumed until the thought hit me this AM. In my template the shadows toolbar is set to cast from edges (one of my clients uses a lot of wrought iron fences and I want a nice shadow so can't use an image png thus I draw them low-poly with edges instead of faces), so I went back to the out-of-the-box SU template and "cast from edges" is not checked...but for any edge drawn the entity toolbar "cast shadows" box is checked by default.
So, does changing the default setting for edges in the entity toolbar really help or actually hurt users like me who set the shadows toolbar to "edges cast"...? (I'm also thinking I should probably uncheck this function on my template and only use it when I need it...?)
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I don't know anything about the inner workings of SU either, but I would guess that to display a shadow from an edge, the app has to treat it like a thin face, about similar as when exporting a model with the "export standalone edges" enabled. So I would use it only when absolutely necessary.
Anssi
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