Chaos Enscape Ideas Portal
The online platform for Enscape users to submit, vote, and collaborate on creative suggestions.
The online platform for Enscape users to submit, vote, and collaborate on creative suggestions.
It would be great to be able to soften artificial light shadows in the same way as natural light shadows.
After reviewing how ray traced artificial light shadows work in Enscape, we will be declining this idea for now.
In ray tracing mode, Enscape does not use a separate shadow softness slider for artificial lights. Shadow softness is a direct result of the light geometry. A larger emitter (for example an area light with a bigger size) produces a wider penumbra and smoother transitions. A very small emitter produces sharper, hard edged shadows, which is expected and physically correct.
For that reason, the practical workaround is to increase the light source size in the host CAD application, where that parameter is available. We also have a short write up with examples in our blog post about ray traced artificial lights.
If ray tracing is disabled, Enscape cannot compute physically correct soft shadows for artificial lights. In that mode we can only provide an approximation, and the result will not match true area light behavior.
One additional limitation is that host integrations differ. Some CAD applications do not expose the required parameters for certain light types yet. For example, in SketchUp we currently cannot access the size property for spot lights.
@Guest Would you please elaborate when do you need this? Maybe with some screenshots?
But softening shadows from natural light is only possible because the sun's properties change throughout the day. Artificial light doesn't have this property; artificial light is unique and can't be altered except by the properties of an IES light. It doesn't make much sense.