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# MayaMan Shadow Options

### Shadow Options

#### Shadows in Renders

This option controls whether the shadow maps are generated for renders.

#### Shadows in Previews

This option controls whether the shadow maps are generated for previews. It can be useful to have shadows disabled in previews but enabled for renders.

#### Consider Displacement Shaders

Usually the displacement of surfaces will not significantly affect the shadow they cast, so faster renders can be achieved by disabling the displacement shaders during shadow map creation.

#### Elide Displacement Shaders With Zero Bound From Shadows

It's not uncommon to have a displacement shader with 0 displacement bounds (ie: dent displacement on a convex object or a displacement shader that only manipulates normals)... normally mayaman will elide these shaders from the shadow ribs on the premise that a shader that has 0 displacement bounds will not change the shadow. As this is not always the case it's now possible to disable this and return to the pre 1.2.37 behaviour.

#### Consider Surface Shaders

Some surface shaders also displace the geometry, so you may need to have surface shaders enabled to pick up displacement in your shadow maps.

#### Reuse Existing Shadow Maps

Shadow maps can be reused in subsequent renders. This is useful if you are constantly re-rendering a scene but the shadows are not changing.

#### Delete Shadow Maps After Use

If this option is on, MayaMan will delete the rendered shadow maps after the main render is complete.

#### Dice PerFrame/Constant Shadow Maps With Main Camera

For Air and PRMan12, when enabled the beauty pass camera's projection information is placed in shadow rib files. This information is used to compute level-of-detail and geometry dicing as if the beauty pass was being rendered, this can assist in shadow registration.

In general it's probably a good idea to compute per-frame shadow maps this way so that an optimal dicing (from the perspective of geo registration) happens... but on constant shadow maps this may lead to slightly unpredictable results as it couples the resulting shadow map to the frame at which it happens to be computed (assuming a moving camera)... due to this, the option is disabled by default for constant shadow maps. Currently there is no per-light override for this.

#### Create Shadow Map Thumbnail

If enabled, the render scripts will contain additional calls to totex that will convert the shadow map to a small image that represents the contents of the shadow map. This image is given a name that is just the name of the shadow map rib file with .tif appended. Both regular and deep shadow maps are supported... if the map resolution is > 256x256 it's scaled down to that size. The pixels in the map that contain data will be shaded with a white-closest to black-furthest ramp. The bounding box of the useful pixels is computed and everything outside that is painted red... images with a lot of red indicate that the shadow map should be re-framed... undefined pixels within this box are painted purple so they can be distinguished from valid but distant pixels.

#### Display Shadow Map During Preview

In PRman, if enabled and the above option is also enabled, the resulting shadow map thumbnails will automatically be displayed with prman's 'sho' utility.

In Air, if enabled the resulting shadow map will be displayed to the framebuffer while it is being rendered. This requires that you be running Air 3.1.20 or later.

#### Output Info

Like the one in the scanline options but controls the statistics for shadow passes (applies to all shadow passes).

### Shadow Map Filtering

#### Use Depth Filter

This option enables the use of one of the depth map filters below.

#### Filter

This controls how the shadow map samples are used to generate the value actually stored in the shadow map. Using 'Min' mode stores the distance from the light to the closest surface at a given pixel. 'Max' mode stores the distance to the furthest geometry. 'Average' stores the mean of all surfaces sampled for the pixel. 'Midpoint' is the most commonly useful shadow mapping mode, and stores the distance between the min and next surfaces. This results in a kind of dynamic shadow bias, that prevents self-shadowing.

### Auto Map Memory Allocation

Use this option to override the default amount of memory allocated by the renderer for auto map storage.

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