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Shadows
The perspective window generates shadows to help show tracking quality and preview how rendered shots will ultimately appear.
The 3-D panel includes control boxes for Cast Shadows and Catch Shadows.
Most objects (except for the Plane) will cast shadows by default when they are created.
When a light is selected, you can control whether or not it casts shadows via the same checkbox on the 3-D panel.
If there are no shadow-catching objects, shadows will be cast onto the ground plane. This may be more or less useful, depending on your ground plane; if the ground is very irregular or non-existent, this will be confusing.
If there are shadow-catching objects defined, shadows will be cast from shadow- casting objects onto the shadow-catching objects. This can preview complex effects such as a shadow cast onto a rough terrain.
NOTE : shadow catching relies on some features of OpenGL that may not be present in older video cards (or "integrated graphics"). In this case, only ground-plane shadows will be produced.
Shadows may be disabled from the main View menu, and the shadow black level may be set from the Preferences color settings. The shadow enable status is “sticky” from one run to the next, so that if you do not usually use it, you will not have to turn it off each time you start SynthEyes.
You can control the resolution of the shadow map from the preferences; you may want to increase it if you are working with image resolutions over HD or notice jaggies along the edges of the shadows (ie if a mesh's shadows extend over the entire size of the image).
Tip: You can create a texture map for the shadows on a mesh, so that you can export and render the shadow independently in other apps. See the Shadow Maker button on the Texture Control Panel.
Note that as with most OpenGL fast-shadow algorithms, there can be shadow artifacts in some cases. Final shadowing should be generated in your 3-D rendering application.
Note that the camera viewport does not display shadows by design.
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