How to avoid shadow on the avatar from point lights?

[ametist]

I am missing something - again I get shadows on the avatar from the Point lights, inside a room for instance. The hair casts a shadow on the back of the avatar. Which I do not want. I have set the Point lights to No Shadows. It dioes not matter if I tick off 'Affect Avatar'. The lights are set to a light volume. So what am I doing wrong?

[Sirius]

Hmmm, those settings should be fine, Korman should export that light without any shadows. Are you sure you don't have another light in your scene (a hidden object perhaps ?).

There was also an issue a while ago with some objects that weren't in any scene, but kept being exported due to a Korman bug. I don't know if this was fixed, might be related.

Anyway, if you can see the avatar casting shadows on itself, then a solution is simply to open the exported Age in PrpShop and find shadow casting lights.
If you don't already have it, PrpShop can be downloaded here along with PlasmaShop. Download and run "Setup-PS30-xxx", and you should have PrpShop installed.
Then, open your Age's main PRP (ending with "Default.prp"), and you will see the name of all shadow casters listed under "Point Shadow Master" or "Direct Shadow Master". This should give you a clue about which light does cast shadows.

[ametist]

Thank you Sirius! I tried first with looking for 'shadow objects' in the list of blender file objects, but nothing there. So installed PlasmaShop ( I had it downloaded but hadn't come around to install it yet, but I'm coming closer and closer to wiring now so... ) and found PrpShop. What a useful thingy! Only light I found though, that was casting lights, was my two suns I have 'outside'. I ticked of the 'cast' under RTshadows for both of them and voila! No shadows indoors!
But this means I have misunderstood, I didnt think the outside sun(s), contained in a lightgroup and a lightvolume, could impact the neighbor lightvolume?

[Sirius]

Yes, PrpShop is extremely useful to display the insides of the PRPs... Assuming you can make sense of it PRPs are complex, and debugging visual issues is the most complex.

But this means I have misunderstood, I didnt think the outside sun(s), contained in a lightgroup and a lightvolume, could impact the neighbor lightvolume?

Hmmm, I haven't worked a lot with light regions, so I made a few tests.

From what I understand, if the avatar is fully outside the sun's volume (and the volume's outside strength is zero), then it should NOT receive shadows from the sun at all.

However, if the avatar is both inside the sun's volume and inside the other neighbor volume, then it will receive lights and shadows from both - a smaller light volume does NOT remove the influence from the bigger one like a footstep sound region would. So for instance, if you go inside a house, the avatar will still be lit up by the sun (whose region encompasses the whole landmass), on top of being lit by the lights inside the house (whose region is physically contained in the landmass).

If that's your case, then the easiest way is to duplicate the "inside" light region, check "Invert", and use this as the sun's region (which means the sun will light the avatar everywhere in the Age EXCEPT for this interior region. If you have only one interior, it's fine.
If you have several interiors, then things get more annoying to setup. You have to use Node Trees to setup softvolumes. In my experience, it can easily result in something that looks fine in Blender but will crash the game.

Ugh... I wish we had proper dynamic shadows coupled with light probes like in more recent games. Doesn't make lighting completely bug-free, but it's still much easier to deal with.

[Tsar Hoikas]

FYI Korman before 0.10 has a bug in its soft volume exporter, causing volumes to be exported in the wrong location. A fix will be available in 0.10

[ametist]

Thanks again for helping out Sirius.

From what I understand, if the avatar is fully outside the sun's volume (and the volume's outside strength is zero), then it should NOT receive shadows from the sun at all.

Yes, this is what I understand too, so I have created my lightvolumes to not interfer with each other. My outside lightvolume region is the first one on the pic, to the left. I have a couple of more volumes, all created to not go into another volume.

FYI Korman before 0.10 has a bug in its soft volume exporter, causing volumes to be exported in the wrong location. A fix will be available in 0.10

Thanks Hoikas! Good to now!

[Sirius]

FYI Korman before 0.10 has a bug in its soft volume exporter, causing volumes to be exported in the wrong location. A fix will be available in 0.10

Ah yes, I didn't pay it much attention since my SV was positioned somewhat correctly, but I did notice the export code relied on vertex normals instead of face normals, which felt weird. Glad to know it's been fixed already

Yes, this is what I understand too, so I have created my lightvolumes to not interfer with each other. My outside lightvolume region is the first one on the pic, to the left. I have a couple of more volumes, all created to not go into another volume.

Ah, so there should be no problem then. We'll have to wait until Korman 0.10 to see if that fixes the issue.
(Light regions can overlap a bit to provide smoother transitions if you want though - it should be no problem.)