The “OFF mode” turns off shadow rendering completely. In “Mode 2”, it is much easier to cover the whole stage with less precise shadow distance settings, but the overall quality of shadows is worse. At closer distances, the shadow will look too pixelated, so you’ll have to decrease that value – you can afford that because at such distances there won’t be too many shadows to take care of. The farther is the camera, the narrower that window usually is, and the higher the value you must set to cover the whole stage. In “Mode 1”, there will be a relatively small window of “shadow distance” value at which *all* elements’ shadows present on screen are displayed. Depending on camera distance to the stage, you may want to adjust it. Shadow setting is the “distance to the shadow source” (confusingly, not the same thing as “light source”) – a conventional parameter determining quality balance in shadows’ rendering. Usually there’s no reason to turn it off. Self-shadow determines whether the engine should calculate only shadows that an item throws at other elements, or does it need to calculate shadows that various parts of the model throw at the model itself. In order to tune your shadows to the current situation, use the second group of commands in View menu: “Self-shadow” and “Shadow setting”. The fact that they are properly rendered, though, doesn’t necessarily mean they will always look pretty – the engine has to settle to its own level of approximation lest calculation time will be unacceptably long. Voila – your models now have genuinely rendered shadows (fig.3). Do the same for every other “material” accessory (that is, not MME effects, stage lights, and such), while you’re at it. Switch into “To camera” mode, select your stage in the AMP, and set its “Shadow” checkbox “on”.
pmd models, all Accessories (to which class your stage most likely belongs) do not have shadows set to “on” by default. Now, that we got rid of this cheap impostor of a shadow rendering engine… why don’t we see *good* shadows? The answer is: each element of your video has its own setting determining both whether it will cast a shadow of its own, and at the same time, will it reflect shadows cast by other elements. Shadows of different types So … How do you make GOOD shadows? In addition, you can’t determine which models should or should not cast shadows, and don’t even try to make stage elements cast shadows of their own.
And even if you level your stage exactly at the necessary height, the color will not look natural – even at its best. What it actually does is produce a flat shadow at zero height, regardless of stage’s actual position and terrain – if your surface is at Y<0, the shadow will dangle in the air, and if the stage is higher there will be no shadow visible at all (fig.2). In all other cases, Display ground shadow brings more trouble than it’s worth. There are only two possible reasons to use it: when you make a video without a stage (fig.1), or your computer is really weak and can’t handle more intensive calculations.
#Shadowframe mme effect how to
The most important thing you must remember about Display ground shadow is HOW TO TURN IT OFF. In the upper half of the list you’ll see “ Display ground shadow” command (and two of its minions – “ Ground shadow color” and “ Transparent ground shadow“). This happens because MikuMikuDance actually has *two* independent systems of shadow rendering and they can conflict if not managed wisely. There are plenty of videos where shadows are simply turned off (quite often, I suspect, because their creators just didn’t like how it turned out and didn’t know how to do better), and there’s a lot of those where the shadows look rather crude demeaning the overall quality of an otherwise good video. Shadow handling is one of the more confusing elements of MMD. How can I adjust the shadows in MMD? What are popular MMD shadow mistakes and how do I not make them? Can I change the shadows? Why do the MMD model’s shadows look fake, look weird? Shadow business …