The ultimate purpose of Shadow Designer is to offer efficient and effective solutions for the "painting by light" approach. In the second version, it has become a fast, feature-rich and flexible system, handling just about every feature of real shadows. It offers many different applications, such as clean & soft shadow projection, light bouncing and color-bleeding effects, simulation of custom shadow styles and more.





On the left, you can see the output of pure radiosity - something that you normally can't do very much about but accept. The picture on right shows what you'll be able to do with Shadow Designer. In this case, several shadow were layers used to add variation into lighting and to emphasize the color bleeding as well.


Feature Highlights

Speed Optimizations:

300% to 2000% increase

more efficient ray sampling

special optimized modes for fast previews

low, medium and high render quality

Render Quality:

300% to 2000% increase

more efficient ray sampling

special optimized modes for fast previews

low, medium and high render quality

Work-Flow and Usability:

completely rewritten, more stable

unlimited number of shadow maps

global (per shadow map) and local (per surface) settings

envelopes, interactive help

interactive, realtime preview

automatic shadow map saving option (all lw formats)

color gradients, allowing original shadow and lighting styles

global and local object exclusion lists


Benchmarks

The convolution algorithm has been completely redesigned and includes various optimizations, which results in a significant speed increase. The following test was performed on a P4 1.6k Mhz, in Lightwave 7.0b, comparing Shadow Designer v1.1, Lightwave Area Light, and Shadow Designer v2.0.

		LEFT: MIDDLE: RIGHT:	Shadow Designer v1.1,rendertime: 58s LW Area Light, rendertime: 33s Shadow Designer v2.0, rendertime: 25s

Full-Color Shadows

The shadow simulation has been enriched with a new crucial ingredience that is color. Shadow Designer currently accounts for transparency, considers the color of the blocking geometry, and adjusts the shadow intensity accordingly. The color strength can be adjusted in several ways, either by modifying the surface transparency, tweaking the cast shadow intensity, or through the color filter strength. These features allow even solid objects to cast 100% color shadows, which is the Holy Grail for those who strive to simulate color bleeding, and other indirect-lighting effects.




Based on the full-color-shadow concept, new color gradients have been added. They allow to adjust color and shadow strength on custom basis; very suitable for cartoon-style rendering or original designs. The only thing you need is imagination!


User Interface and Work-Flow

Being aware of a few limitations in the previous version, and upon receiving a lot of suggestions from the users, we built up a completely new system that maximizes the flexibility when performing UI related operations. The new modular architecture links the SDRender and SDTrance instances via unique shadow_maps, and allows global/local setting modifications.




The other improvements to user-interface include an "X-Dof style" preview, object exclusion list per SDTrace instance, new blending modes, and automatic shadow map saving. The system is fully animatable via envelopes. Should you get dizzy from so many new features, the interactive help built-in in the interface, will give you the first aid.


Limitations

Since this plugin works with pixels, the margins and corners of the image happen to get convoluted unevenly. For best results, you either render in a slightly higher resolution and cut away the margins - the size of convolution radius, or increase the number of sampling rays.


Requirements

LightWave 7.x - 9.x
WinNT, Win2000, WinXP, OS 9, OS X
At least 128mb ram recommended