Maya® Studio Projects Texturing and Lighting

Light Width

Area lights are able to create shadow edge degradation because of the physically based lighting calculation they employ. (As discussed in Chapter 1, area lights function like an array of point lights whose rays overlap at the shadow edges.) Other light types do not produce the degradation, but instead produce hard-edged raytraced shadows by default. You can soften the shadow edges, however, by artificially increasing the light's width. The attribute that controls the width varies in name, as shown in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2 Light width attributes

The light from a spot, point, or volume light emanates from a finite location in space. With ...