Strange Shadow Errors
 

I'm attempting to build this spaceship and I've ran into all kind of problems. It's curved surface is creating all kinds of strange effects when I render it. I've resolved a few of the problems I've encountered, but this latest one has me stumped, when I turn on the render shadows option I get a lot of these ugly triangles. It doesn't do it with the render shadows option turned off.How do I defeat this?

Hopefully this pic link works:

http://members.cox.net/tranquility5/...aceshipone.jpg

Have you checked for non-planar polys?

Hmm, no. How do I check for those? I'm a novice at this.:confused:

Hmm... Well, I don't have LW in front of me right now, but if I remember correctly, then the polygon statistics panel (^H, W) will show any non-planar polys.

You have four options to try and eliminate them:

1. Manually adjust points to make them planar.
2. Convert the object to subpatches
3. In the surface editor, change the max smoothing angle
4. Triple all 4 or greater point polys.

Thank you very much! I had 190 non-planars and I tripled them all and it went away. That was so easy, but I was stopped cold on that problem. It renders perfectly now. :cool:

No problem. That's what we're all here for.

Ya always watch out for those ugly non-planers there your first suspect in rendering anomalies.

if u can , try to post the final render with the nonplanar polygons gone

I am up against some nasty non-planar issues myself right now. Only I resist the idea of tripling them for various reasons. Mostly because I am trying to keep it real clean.

Spacedrive: Was the triple thing clean enough? Could you maybe post a shaded wireframe for me to see?

Nice ship BTW.

I was pretty pleased with the results:

http://members.cox.net/tranquility5/...pone_fixed.jpg

Now I have to do some major texture maps to complete it.

I don't know if it would be clean enough if you were doing precise, close-up renders, but this was more than good enough for my purposes as this is as close as I'm going to get to the model in my scene.

Looks pretty good so far.