Jeff - thanks for confirming that. I think the range is good as-is, considering the security measure not to let users accidentally blow up the video memory.
I needed this info for a plugin where as a part of functionality I can toggle between low quality and high-quality shadows quickly to control the display speed.
In general with Rhino 6 I am struggling to find a good balance of quality and speed in Render mode, when using both Skylight and Sun cast shadows. At the high/highest quality, when using both, the view speed reduction is quite significant and moving around the vport is not smooth anymore.
At the same time, whether it is Skylight-only, or Sun-Shadows only (high-quality), the speed is still blazing fast.
Of course the best look is when both are ON. But in general visually lower Skylight quality is much more passable than low cast shadow quality. In ideal world we should be able to have grainy Skylight effect for speed (that still adds a lot of “meat” to the view) but sharp-edged shadows from high-quality cast-shadow setting. I wonder if such combination is possible and if it would result with a lot of speed gain.
We would only care about super-smooth Skylight for screencaptures; a bit grainy for navigation is fine.
I was suggesting making two separate controls for Skylight and Cast Shadow quality earlier in Beta, not even knowing the speed slowdown effect now tested and described above. Now it comes up again with more thorough testing on real-life projects in V6.
@Andy, @DavidEranen - in case you see this, any ideas how to marry good quality cast shadows with Skylight that doesn’t slow down the display too much?
thanks,
–jarek