Issues with Cycles Shadows

Hi Folks,

I am having an issue with Cycles where my shadows are rendering in some areas as if I have selected shade flat, but it is shade smooth. Without making any changes, the first image is rendered with Eevee, the second with Cycles and the difference is obvious - any suggestions?

Eevee Render

Cycles Render

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I think your yellow base mesh is inverted. Your normal’s pointing in the wrong direction.

go in edit mode.
select all with 'a'.
Then shift n, to recalculate normal’s.

And you can not compare Cycles with Eevee, one on one. These are different render techniques.

Thanks FedPete, but no, it’s not that - they are all correct and pointing outwards, I have even created a whole new model. where I have built a base and just added a straight forward sphere with no adjustment other than scale, as in image below and it is still doing it.

I appreciate that the engines are different, but I have never seen this before and it seems strange to me based on my previous experience of Cycles that this is happening.

Do you mean these square artefacts?

They look familiar. But I have no clue. I have them also, by creating a sphere and looking at in Cycles.

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Yeah exactly - although I think I may have fixed it - or at least found a workaround. It improves dramatically with a change of colour and the addition of a second light.

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yes I knwo. Michael, in the 2.79 course, spoke about this. I forgot what to do, maybe someone else know the answer.

Cool, thanks - hopefully somebody will know :smiley:

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You can add a sub division modifier ! this smooths it out also!

Ah great, I will try that, thanks! I need to find that balance between quality of image versus size of model :slight_smile:

In case anybody else gets this, I got to the bottom of it, actually because I couldn’t get the section with the bevel modifier to work. I have no idea how I had done it, but on a number of my objects, including my base as above, I had multiple geometries. Everything was rendering OK in the viewport, there wasn’t that weird blurry face effect, but when I did merge by distance, hundreds of vertices were removed that must have been exact duplicates. As soon as they went, everything rendered normally again and I was not getting the flat shading effect with my shadows as above.

Image below is roughly the same colour, with a single light and it is as expected…

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Hurray! Glad you’ve managed it. A great learning adventure!

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