AoA Grass Shader- how do I get rid of dark shadows?

Sand3

I'm using the Age of Armor grass shader and I'm trying to make it light colored, like dry grass in direct sunlight, but even when I set everything up with pale colors, I can't get the dark shadows out of the grass.

Fishtales

Try changing the Ambient colour to a lighter shade.

Mattymanx

what are you using for lights?

Sand3

Fishtales said:

Try changing the Ambient colour to a lighter shade.
There is no ambient color with this shader.

what are you using for lights?

For the above render I used the DS Defaults Distant Light, but I've tried it with a lot of different lighting sets and all of them have really dark shadows. I want to set it up so that the shadows it casts are less intense, like when I screw around with the ambient on a normally textured object.

Ostadan

If you have Advanced Ambient Light, you might use it keyed to illuminate just the grass, and have a less-than-black AO shade? Just a guess.

Sand3

Ostadan said:

If you have Advanced Ambient Light, you might use it keyed to illuminate just the grass, and have a less-than-black AO shade? Just a guess.

I have Advanced Light Flags, which contains 'Accept Shadows', 'Ambient Strength Flag', Diffuse Strength Flag and Index of Refraction Flag. I've tried all of these at 100% and 0% (or on and off with 'Accept Shadows') and none of them seem to affect the grass's own shadows, and none of them have a color field.
The only places I have color fields for are Diffuse, Specular and Translucency, and the Light Flags is the only place I have anything to do with Ambient.
The attached image is all the fields available for this shader.

Pendraia

Sand3 said:

Ostadan said:

If you have Advanced Ambient Light, you might use it keyed to illuminate just the grass, and have a less-than-black AO shade? Just a guess.

I have Advanced Light Flags, which contains 'Accept Shadows', 'Ambient Strength Flag', Diffuse Strength Flag and Index of Refraction Flag. I've tried all of these at 100% and 0% (or on and off with 'Accept Shadows') and none of them seem to affect the grass's own shadows, and none of them have a color field.
The only places I have color fields for are Diffuse, Specular and Translucency, and the Light Flags is the only place I have anything to do with Ambient.
The attached image is all the fields available for this shader.

Is it possible to change the shadow colour on your light set?

Just looking at the shader itself I can't see anything that would be doing it which means it possible the shadows are too dark...

Edit to add...just looked at the default distant light and under the parameters tab if you click on shadow you will see the colour defaults to black you need to change this I would suggest to a darker shade of green to get a more realistic shadow...

Sand3

Pendraia said:

Edit to add...just looked at the default distant light and under the parameters tab if you click on shadow you will see the colour defaults to black you need to change this I would suggest to a darker shade of green to get a more realistic shadow...

I tried setting the shadow color to a medium green-brown, but it didn't seem to make any difference, then I set it all the way to white to see what would happen, no difference. I think the shadow color is for when I set the light to make objects cast shadows, I'm not sure it effects displacementish shaders at all.

The biggest problem is that if I brighten the lights, the shadows get lighter, but so do the highlights. I'm trying to get less overall contrast in the grass, to make it more muted.

Mattymanx

I would highly recommend using the Advanced lights by Ageofarmour. A single distant light alone will not light any scene properly since by default lights in DS do not work as lights do in the real world. An ambient light can go a long way to giving the scene the much needed spread of lighitng it needs to look more natural. Here is two of my promos from my christmas freebie. Both use the advanced spotlight and advanced ambient light.

Pendraia

Mattymanx said:

I would highly recommend using the Advanced lights by Ageofarmour. A single distant light alone will not light any scene properly since by default lights in DS do not work as lights do in the real world. An ambient light can go a long way to giving the scene the much needed spread of lighitng it needs to look more natural. Here is two of my promos from my christmas freebie. Both use the advanced spotlight and advanced ambient light.

Nice work Matty! Lighting can make a difference...are these shaders using shader mixer? If so using a shader mixer camera would also possibly help.

Sand3

As I said, while DS Defaults Distant Light was the lighting used in the first render on this post, but I have tried it with more than ten different light sets using a combination of area and distant lights. Different lights make the grass brighter overall, but that isn't what I want, I'm trying to mellow out difference between the highlight and shadows.

If I make all of the colors in the grass dark and then use intense lights, I can get the grass close to the kind of contrast I want, but then everything else in my scene becomes ruined by the overwhelming lighting. I can't just use lights to fix a problem with one texture because the lights alter everything; I need to fix the problem with the texture itself.

The attached uses Cyclorama beach lights. I'm trying for a very low-contrast pastel kind of look for the grass like is in the background photo up in the corner, but even when I make all the colors in the grass-shader nearly identical, it still has a lot of contrast.

Pendraia

Sand3 said:

As I said, while DS Defaults Distant Light was the lighting used in the first render on this post, but I have tried it with more than ten different light sets using a combination of area and distant lights. Different lights make the grass brighter overall, but that isn't what I want, I'm trying to mellow out difference between the highlight and shadows.

If I make all of the colors in the grass dark and then use intense lights, I can get the grass close to the kind of contrast I want, but then everything else in my scene becomes ruined by the overwhelming lighting. I can't just use lights to fix a problem with one texture because the lights alter everything; I need to fix the problem with the texture itself.

The attached uses Cyclorama beach lights. I'm trying for a very low-contrast pastel kind of look for the grass like is in the background photo up in the corner, but even when I make all the colors in the grass-shader nearly identical, it still has a lot of contrast.

that last render looks quite good...slightly different colour to the background photo though. Hmmm...that background looks as if the grass is drying out in parts but then has more bright green as well. Have you tried playing with the tones in the background to match it up?

Sand3

I figured it out! Turning specular color to black was the answer! Without the glare, I could just turn the grass to very pale similar colors and work it down to low contrast.

Pendraia

Sand3 said:

I figured it out! Turning specular color to black was the answer! Without the glare, I could just turn the grass to very pale similar colors and work it down to low contrast.

nice work...

Mattymanx

Pendraia said:

Mattymanx said:

I would highly recommend using the Advanced lights by Ageofarmour. A single distant light alone will not light any scene properly since by default lights in DS do not work as lights do in the real world. An ambient light can go a long way to giving the scene the much needed spread of lighitng it needs to look more natural. Here is two of my promos from my christmas freebie. Both use the advanced spotlight and advanced ambient light.

Nice work Matty! Lighting can make a difference...are these shaders using shader mixer? If so using a shader mixer camera would also possibly help.

I dont use shader mixer atm.