Shadow Settings

Each object in your scene casts shadows if depth projection is not disabled under Preferences. To display shadows, you must enable at least one light to cast shadows by checking the Render Shadows box in the Lights palette before adjusting the settings in the Objects palette. If this is not selected, objects with Cast Shadows enabled still don’t appear to be casting shadows.

If Shadow Maps > Allowed have been enabled in the Mari Preferences Dialog, there are two related options that can be set to customize the shadow settings. Resolution and Layer Count control the texture resolution and shadow coverage.

Both these options are dependent on the graphics card. Mari automatically attempts to set this option at the resolution that works best for your setup. If there aren’t sufficient graphics memory resources, Mari degrades the quality of the shadows so as to use fewer resources until shadows can be rendered.

To allow your model to cast shadows:

1.

Select the object in the Objects palette.

2.

Under Rendering, enable Cast Shadows.

Each object in your scene has the setting Cast Shadows.

Selecting this checkbox casts shadows from your models onto other objects in the scene, based on your current lighting setup.

3.

From the Project Controls toolbar, select one of the two following lighting modes: Basic with Shadows or Full with Shadows.

Note:  Using variance maps allow the shadow edges to be smoothed out, but may sometimes cause
rendering artifacts. To prevent these artifacts from occurring, disable the Use Variance Maths checkbox under Mari Preferences Dialog > GPU > Shadow Maps.
To prevent these artifacts from occurring, disable the Use Variance Maths checkbox under Mari Preferences Dialog > GPU > Shadow Maps. See the Mari Preferences Dialog section in the Mari Reference Guide.