Light World

A lighting type:

• None — render the atmosphere as if there were no global lights, that is, there will be no sky color gradient in any direction.
• Sun — render the atmosphere in accordance with the Sun's lighting.
• Moon — render the atmosphere in accordance with the Moon's lighting.

Scattering = Sun	Scattering = Moon

Shadow cascade generation mode to be used (available for the Static light mode only):

• Dynamic — In this mode shadow cascades are built dynamically relative to the camera position making it possible to change the time of day (day-night cycle).

• Static — In this mode shadow cascades are built relative to the light source position and baked. This mode is suitable as a performance optimization technique for small-area ArchViz projects where shadow cascades can be divided into 2 sections: walkable area with high-resolution shadows (as they're observed closely) and non-walkable area with low-resolution shadows (as they're observed from a distance).

  Notice

  • Changing the time of day is not available in this mode, as shadow cascades are baked.
  • Shadows cast by transparent surfaces cannot be baked. To make such shadows visible when any light-baking mode is enabled, configure the transparent surfaces: toggle the dynamic lighting mode for them (Surface -> Rendering -> Lighting Mode -> Dynamic).

Toggles the One Cascade Per Frame mode on and off. This mode distributes the update of shadow cascades across multiple rendering frames: shadows from static geometry are rendered into only one cascade per frame.

A number of cascades with different shadow maps. Each cascade requires a separate rendering pass. All the shadow maps have the same resolution (the Shadow Resolution parameter value), but are applied to different cascades. Thus, close-range shadows are of higher quality and distant ones of lower. The minimum number of cascades is 1, the maximum is 4. Increasing the number of cascades enhances the rendered image quality. However, at that, performance efficiency drops.

In Static cascade mode, shadow cascades are additionally visualized by the boxes that define the shadow area.

A multiplier for the distance to the border of the cascade in range [0;1].

Distance to the border depends on the Cascade Mode and is set as follows:

• For Dynamic mode — corresponds to the Shadows Distance value and is measured from the Camera position.
• For Static mode — is defined by the dimensions of the shadow area box projection and measured from the Light World position.

The number of cascade borders depends on the number of cascades:

• For one cascade, there is no cascade border.
• For 4 cascades, there are 3 cascade borders (for the first three cascades).

For the last cascade, the multiplier is always 1.

Setting the cascade borders allows you to accurately adapt the quality of the shadows depending on their remoteness from the viewer.

• Decreasing the multiplier value makes the cascade smaller, more compact positioned and covering less distance. At the same time, the resulting shadow is of a higher quality.
• Increasing the multiplier value makes the cascade larger with broader coverage of the area.

Cascade border 0 = 0.02 (shadow of higher quality)	Cascade border 0 = 0.1

Distance from the light source position along the light direction vector.