Can anyone tell me why my shadows are coming out so pixellated when I use BPR, and if there is some setting I should be using to correct this? My model has over 4 million polys, and they’re fairly evenly distributed, so I’m not sure what’s going on here.
How zoomed in are you for that little screenshot? If you zoom in past “actual size” (document actual size, button on upper right of viewport), things will look pixelated. A better look at a larger portion of the picture would be helpful.
If it is at actual size, and I had to guess from looking at it, it looks like the Shadow Resolution in you BRP shadow properties was set too low (Render>Bpr Shadow>Res). It’s usually ok by default, though, unless you’re rendering at an especially large document size. You could try increasing it.
I’m not zoomed in at all. That’s actual render size. As for the Shadow Resolution, I had that bumped up as far as it would go (8192).
I did discover that if I adjust the Blur setting that the pixellation would go away, but then I lose any semblance of a crisp shadow.
It’s really hard to tell whats going on without getting a better look at things.
Try turning on “Smooth Normals” in the render properties palette, to turn on poly smoothing, and make sure its not an issue with your mesh. It’s possible it might just be too low res (even at 4 mil, depending on how much area those 4 mil are covering) in that particular area, for the size you are rendering at.
Note: Also make sure it is turned on for the tool/subtool in question in the Tool>Display properties panel)
Other than that I have no idea from what Im looking at. Keep in mind BPR shadow edges are never 100% crisp and clean in my experience. You’d need to use the legacy shadows for that. Sorry I couldnt be more helpful.
I tried subdividing the subtool again, and that helped some, but at 22 million polys for just that subtool (which covers from about mid ribcage up and does not include the arms below the lowest point of the deltoids), I’m at the end of what my machine can handle. I’ll have undo the last subdivision to finish sculpting and polypainting, and then reapply it once I’m completely ready to render.
Thanks for the help! 
Thats what “Smooth Normals” is for. It applies a smoothing effect at rendertime to the mesh so you don’t have to increase Polycounts through the roof. Theoretically.
I’ve not actually tried it in this version though…maybe the bpr shadows dont take that smoothing into account.
But you definitely shouldn’t have to be pushing 20 million polys to get smooth shadows, unless the tool encompasses some huge amount of surface area and detail, or you’re rendering at an especially high document resolution. Like I said, I cant really see whats going on.
You may want to adjust the shadow modifiers in the Render:BPR Shadow.
Adjust the Res value and Rays.
If you want crisp shadows use high Res value and very small angle (such as .1) with sufficient Rays count to resolve the shadow borders.
Thanks Spyndel:)
I’m not sure that this is a solution.
I can confirm that using blur at 0 and angle at 0 produces a mess of heavily pixelated useless shadows.
All other methods here just blur this existing mess.
May related to this: Have you tried to export passes for compositing in Ps?
If yes, why the render/diffusion map is not antialiased? Though antialiasing value (normally at 3 is set to 5-6)
Why the shadows map is in this complete mess?
Nothing of this is related to mesh resolution, come on now, some help is needed.
BTW a little out of topic:
Why shadows casted on background look less blurred than the ones on the object?
Okay, I changed the settings as shown in the attached images, but, as you can see, the pixellation is still quite prominent.
Here is what it looks like with the same settings, but with blur bumped up to 10.
Ok, I did my own tests on this, since its a matter which will be concerning me shortly. Used demo soldier and default R2 lighting. Shadow resolution actually didn’t seem to make much difference one way or the other, but I maxed it in all cases just to eliminate a variable.
The default BPR shadow settings produced shadows that were “acceptable” in most areas. But near the belt area where the casting object and receiving object were very close and the shadows slight (see the section in the orange box in the image), I ran into a pixelation/ moire pattern like you have there. The pixelation was a separate pattern from the underlying mesh topology, so that had nothing to do with.
At first, it seemed like nothing I did could get rid of it. Pumping blur or angle just resulted in blurry , gauzy shadows, shadow res was already maxed, sub pixel res did nothing, increasing rays by itself did nothing except increase my render times.
However, increasing rays and angle in tandem seemed to do the trick for me. I increased rays to about 100, and increased angle to about the same ballpark…1.3 or so. Maxing angle just results in more blurry shadows, but modest increases hand in hand with the ray count seems to yield good results.
The “better” and “best” is subjective. The “better” results actually look pretty good, but you mentioned you wanted crisp shadows, so once I had the pixelation under control, I decreased the blur to 1, and got crisper edges of decent quality.
Or you could always just render everything twice as large and export AA half size mode images, where Im sure the pixelation probably wont be as apparent.
I hope this is helpful to your situation. If not, I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help.
Same results here Spyndel!
What concerns me most is that pixelation happens on some semi shaded areas too.
BTW, what is this almost visible nasty darker line on the borders of the casted shadow?
I noticed this, even worse than the pixelation issue.
But please, do me a favor, post a render using 0 blur.
Or post the individual BPR passes as exported. You’ll notice that Only! the mask is antialiased, all other maps are pixelated (depthmask included) leading to ugly artifacts in Ps and making BPR r2 completely useless. It isn’t the exported masks only. If you try PP internally, the same artifacts will occur. For instance, try to make a grey background completely dark using BPR filters , you’ll face the issue alright.
Ive been having the same issues. and it seems to get worse with a high subtool count( getting really ugly results). the best work around i have found is to render it out first with best render and then use the bpr render.
Yeah, it’s been impossible for me to get a good results when using BPR in 4r2. I have a comparison of the best I could accomplish in 4r2 vs the best in previous, 4.
As you can see, no matter how high resolution I use in r2 it’s not enough, while in 4 I got exactly the results I wanted instantly.
Perhaps 4r3 will fix this issue, or perhaps Pixologic can provide us with some actual help with this issue. Having made the software they should be able to look at our examples and tell us what we’re doing wrong (if the fault is on our end), or tell us they’ve screwed up (if it’s on their end) so we don’t waste our time faffing about trying fix something that has no solution (on our end).
