I am looking for advice to improve one of my recently completed renders for @fungi3432’s game. I will attach the render below for reference as I describe my issues.
The problems I have are twofold. First, I would like the shadows to look sharper. Right now they look more fanned-out. Second, I would like to have a bloom effect around the sun. I do not like how sharp the transition between the sun and background is right now.
For the sun bloom, I have tried increasing the strength of the emissive texture, switching the sun to a spotlight, and having the light pass through a thin volume volume. None of it has given me the effect I want.
For the shadows, I have tried rendering at a very high number of samples (the above render was done at 10,000 samples), increasing the amount of subdivisions the geometry has, and moving the sun farther away. These seem to be working better, but I still have yet to see if they will have a major effect on the final render.
Help would be appreciated. I would also like to render this in cycles rather than adding after effects in an image editing program, if that is possible.
For the sharper shadows and sun, use cycle and not evee (works for me) and then make a plane with emission. Place it behind the characters and then make it not visible for the camera. Hope it works for you
For your shadows fix, I am already using Cycles. I didn’t mention it in the post, but I thought it could be inferred because I said the specific number of samples I was using (you can’t control that in Eevee), and that I commented at the end that I would prefer if solutions are applicable to Cycles. Sorry for the confusion.
Second, I do not understand what your second suggestion would achieve. I am already using a sun light to light the scene and I just want to add a bloom effect around the sun you see in the render. I don’t understand how adding an invisible emissive plane would help. If you could clarify, that would be helpful.
I was able to solve this issue by replacing the sun with a spotlight and by using Blender’s compositing tools to add after effects for bloom. Thanks to those that replied. No further replies are needed.
