Soft Shadows in Cycles Raytraced View

Hello!

Is it possible to specify the shadow in the raytraced mode (cycles) in Rhino 6? In other programs it is possible to e.g. define the shadow as soft, so the more distance between object and shadowcast the more blurry it gets with → the shadow corners are not sharp anymore.
Is it possible to achieve such thing?

Best
strudelone

Hi strudelone - you’d need to use a rectangular light or an emissive material to get this effect.

-Pascal

Thanks for your fast response. Rectangular Lights work indeed! I somehow cant get emissive materials alone to work with a e.g. spotlight to get soft shadows.
Another thing i was wondering about is that the following options are greyed out:

Hello - for an emissive material, assign it to a plane that will be the light source. The options are grayed out because they do not apply to raytracing - that page is there to support the ‘cheap’ OpenGL display modes like Shaded, rendered etc.

-Pascal

Works great. Thank you for your response! Is there any Default Project that describe a realistic softness of shadows? E.g. the ideal size and distance of a rectangular light or an emissive material?

None that I know of - softness will depend on the scale or area of the source combined with how close it is - larger or closer = softer shadows, I suppose it will take some trial and error to get the right combination.

-Pascal