2.8 Hurdles and Roadblocks

@smurfmier1985 Wait, c’est le bit confused. 

So the radius option will disappear once I make an action with the sun, it’s on of those things that you only get one chance? Does the radius affect the shadow? Spikey said no, so what does the radius do? Also what if I change my mind of the radius later? I’d be radiusless then.

Then the angle is a different thing then, but I see it affects the shadow the object cast on the floor, but it doesn’t seem to change the shadow on the object… also does changing the angle apart from affecting the softness and hardness of the shadow, does it affect the direction the light shines? 

The real sun is complicated enough man. 

@dostovel just switch to the nun, everything is is easier with the nun because you already know your shadows will be unrealistic :-p

The radius thingy is a one change never change your mind option. But Spikey is usually spot on with his assessments so I trust his word it doesn’t change your shadows.

For the other stuff, I dunno.. I like the nun..

@spikeyxxx any thoughts?

@dostovel My advice: “Do not mess with the Radius of the Sun Light!”

It has something to do with how far the light reaches with  the Point and Spot Light. With the Area Light it’s the size.

With the Sun Light it seems only to affect the Strength; a Radius of 0.01m and a strength of 2, gave me the same result as a Radius of 1000m and a Strength of 1.

In Eevee however, a smaller Radius of the Sun Light gives a brighter image, so better leave the Radius alone and do not try to understand it;)

@waylow You can access the file here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1uQARj0zmVeDL91rIZcL50xTU7jVLo88D 

In the “Blend Packed Files folder” –> Open file “Render 2.8 Scene 3 Packed” 

When you open that file in Blender 2.8, if you check Simplify the Heli model wont simplify yet the Earth on the background will. That file is linking assets that are in the “Assets Files” folder that is also there in Google Drive. Play around if you like and yes I feel ashamed of that rig, I need to learn how to rig, I would’ve done some better animation. 

Let me know if it’s really a glitch in the matrix, that would be my first finding ever. 

I discovered something while setting my challenge project up for compositing that I think might be very important for people to know: when rendering in Eevee, there is currently no way to mask/holdout any objects in your scene, like you can with Cycles.  The Holdout and Indirect Only buttons are still there in the Outliner and are clickable, but they have no effect when Eevee is your engine.  I researched to see whether or not this was a bug, but it is not; the functionality is not there.  I don’t know if there’s plans to add it in the future or not.  Just something to keep in mind!

For anyone not there yet, “holdout” or masking is when one of your objects is set to be invisible but still hide anything behind it in the scene, from the camera’s perspective.  It is different from simply being set to not appear in the render; when an object is set as a holdout, it leaves a black hole in the render, in the shape of its silhouette.  This is very useful when compositing, if you want to be able to adjust the colors or other material properties of particular objects in a scene independently of the rest of the scene after rendering.