Light/Shadow Mystery

[Nathi Tappan]

Hey there!

I’m stumped and before I started nucking anything I figured I’d ask there was an obvious route to take that I am missing…

I’m making a super simple scene where this card flips in the air. Lighting looks great except for a few frames where this super hard shadow goes through.

At first I imagined it was the flip… it must be facing the ground or something. Well..not entiretly. So I tried a bounce card. Heck, not even a sun lamp right in front of it will light it. 🤔

Must be the geometry, UV map? But wouldn’t it show on the remaining of the scene? The card/textures are fine at all other times.

Anyways… stumped. If you guys have seen something like this before, or have any other places you’d look before starting over, I’m all ears!

Thank you!!

[Martin Bergwerf]

Hi Nathi,

Haven’t seen something like that before. I think I’ll need to see the file, in order to be able to troubleshoot that.

[Omar Domenech]

Perhaps the card is too thin and the geometry is freaking out. Try making the card a bit thicker and see if that makes it go away.

[Nathi Tappan]

That was a great idea Omar, one that I haven’t thought about troubleshooting at first, but was totally feasible especially because I modeled the card to real life dimensions and it is tiny! 

But after going through my textures and turning on an off every single node I found a problem with a color ramp on my normal map. I cannot explain why at all… but for some reason having it set to B-Spline caused the weird dark line. Ease, Linear, or off… and no problem at all. 

Thank you for offering to take a look at it for me Martin! I can live with the change on the texture though… 

Happy New Year to you both!!

[Author]

Posts