Basic Podium lighting question
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I've had some decent results using Podium, but one thing that is really bugging me is the problem of cast shadows. I've read through the various tutorials and threads on the Podium site and followed Jim Allen's pdf tutorial exactly, but I'm darned if I can figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Below is an emulation of the lighting setup in that tutorial. The pendant lamp is the one that can be downloaded...so the space to be lit is approximately the same. I'm using the same tiny omni light inside the shade. The render is set to quality.xml, but cearly the result is nothing like the tutorial...I'm getting really hard shadows cast by the shade, whereas in the tutorial there don't appear to be any; or at least they are very diffuse. What obvious point am I missing here?
I might add that this is the part of the tutorial immediately before you add an extra omni just below the shade to act as a booster...when I do that, the results are even worse, as I get a whacking great shadow of the shade on the ceiling.We'd like to be able to offer render-ready models on FF in a variety of formats (the caveat being that they don't adversely affect the skp model in straight SU output) and this obvious glitch is causing some problems.
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Hi Alan
I've been playing with Podium to see if I was able to produce some nice renderings, and I found out that the different presets is very different!
Try to unpack the attatched file and put the .xml file in the presets folder. ( Google SketchUp 7\Plugins\Podium\presets ) It's a preset I've been working on to make the shadows soft, but not sure if it works on omnies!
You have to restart sketchup to be able to choose the new preset!
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Thanks David, I'll give that a try. I would have thought that the quality preset might have been good enough...but obviously not. The soft shadows one you posted must be doing something; I'll let you know how I get on. At the rate that it's shooting photons, that's likely to be around the end of next week.
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That tutorial is unfortunately obsolete now and we are taking it down. When I wrote it, the code for Podium was different. To increase speed, the radius of the omnis was changed and now it isn't possible to get the same results with omnis that you used to.
However, if you want to create downward-pointing lights, spotlights do give some nice soft lighting effects, similar to the old omnis. Tuts3d has posted a model on the Podium forum (the best place to post questions like this) with some really nice spotlights you can use as templates.
If you look here (http://supodiumforum.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=1682792&highlight=spot+light&trail=15) you will see the last post on the first page has some great lights.
I might update it, but it depends on the timing of V2
[Edit: I'm fairly sure that the presets don't change the omni softness in the slightest]
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Jim you are absolutely correct preset cannot change softness of omni lights.
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