Question How to Preventing Specific Atoms from Casting Shadows in VAM ?

[Jerom]

Is there any way to prevent specific atoms from casting shadows under invisible light?

For example, in a scene where two characters are very close, I don’t want one character’s shadow to block the other, but I don’t want to turn off the shadow of invisible lights either.

I know that in Unity, you can exclude specific objects during baking.

Is there a way to achieve this function in VAM?

 

[MacGruber]

You could likely write a plugin (of find/pay someone to do it for you) that goes through all the renderers of the atom and sets "receiveShadows = false" for all of them. However, that is kind of a weird thing to do, unless your characters are partially transparent like for a "hologram" or something like that. Otherwise your brain will immediately tell you that it looks "wrong".

What you are likely really looking for are VaM's global illumination settings? You can get diffuse lighting via spherical harmonics and specular lighting from a low-res cubemap. Because it's fake GI of course (you need raytracing otherwise, which is too expensive for VR) there are no shadows. Usually you are limited to the available skyboxes that come with VaM. Besides the actual sky, they also do matching GI. However, you may want to checkout SkyMagic (part of my Essentials plugin set) for custom global illumination. Having good GI that actually matches your light setup is especially important for anything shiny, like polished metal/plastic, leather, latex or anything wet.

Wiki Article - 06. Scene Lighting

Scene Lighting Scene lighting is taken from the HDRI backgrounds included with VaM. There are 29 available choices accessed from the ”Global Illumination Sky” dropdown menu. The lighting from this only affects atoms built into VaM. it will not affect geometry brought in with an...

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MacGruber Essentials - Plugins + Scripts -

Your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package. Note that you can download older versions of this plugin for free from here. AudioReverb Adds an Reverb filter effect to the audio source you place the plugin on. It's...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[Jerom]

You could likely write a plugin (of find/pay someone to do it for you) that goes through all the renderers of the atom and sets "receiveShadows = false" for all of them. However, that is kind of a weird thing to do, unless your characters are partially transparent like for a "hologram" or something like that. Otherwise your brain will immediately tell you that it looks "wrong".

What you are likely really looking for are VaM's global illumination settings? You can get diffuse lighting via spherical harmonics and specular lighting from a low-res cubemap. Because it's fake GI of course (you need raytracing otherwise, which is too expensive for VR) there are no shadows. Usually you are limited to the available skyboxes that come with VaM. Besides the actual sky, they also do matching GI. However, you may want to checkout SkyMagic (part of my Essentials plugin set) for custom global illumination. Having good GI that actually matches your light setup is especially important for anything shiny, like polished metal/plastic, leather, latex or anything wet.

Wiki Article - 06. Scene Lighting

Scene Lighting Scene lighting is taken from the HDRI backgrounds included with VaM. There are 29 available choices accessed from the ”Global Illumination Sky” dropdown menu. The lighting from this only affects atoms built into VaM. it will not affect geometry brought in with an...

hub.virtamate.com

MacGruber Essentials - Plugins + Scripts -

Your most essential MacGruber tools in a convenient single VAR package. Note that you can download older versions of this plugin for free from here. AudioReverb Adds an Reverb filter effect to the audio source you place the plugin on. It's...

hub.virtamate.com

Holy shit, I did't expected to be answered by McGruber !

First of all, thank you very much for taking the time to provide such a detailed response to my question.

In fact, what I need exactly is for a“normal” Person Atom to not cast a shadow under invisible lights, while still allowing another Person Atom in the same scene casting shadows under the same invisible lights.

The specific scenario I encountered is: I set up very satisfactory lighting for one character A (such as a female actress) in the scene, but when another character B stands very close in front of A - such as a person atom B that I possess in VR, B casts a shadow on A, ruining the lighting I set up for A. However, I can’t simply turn off the ‘casting shadow’ of invisible lights in the scene because the light I set up on character A needs shadows to provide detail and depth to the character.

Lights in Unity have a culling mask property that allows you to selectively light certain objects in the scene. So, I would like to ask, apart from writing my own plugin, is there currently any built-in functionality in VAM’s settings that can achieve this goal? Also, to your knowledge, do you know of any existing plugins that can meet this need?

Thank you again in advance.

 

[MacGruber]

apart from writing my own plugin, is there currently any built-in functionality in VAM’s settings that can achieve this goal?

Nope.

Again, you very likely just want to change your light setup. Having light sources come in from the sides in addition to global illum should do the trick.