This is a quick post on why some shadows have soft edges, and other shadows have hard edges.

The picture below looks pretty normal right?

Let’s zoom into the shadows on the ground:

The shadows of the circular platforms on the right are sharp, but get softer as they go to left.

Here you can see a similar effect with a light post, where the shadow is sharp on the left and soft on the right (click these images to zoom in if you want to):

And lastly you can see that the plants in this picture have a sharp shadow (and so does the curb), while the trees above it (out of the picture) cast a soft shadow:

Why are some shadows soft and some shadows hard?

The crux of what is going on here is that shadows that are nearer to the objects casting the shadow are sharper. Shadows that are farther from the objects casting the shadow are softer.

More plainly: Things closer to the ground have sharper edged shadows.

Go have another look at the pictures if you want (click them to see them full sized) and see how distance from the ground affects the sharpness of the shadow’s edge.

Why Does This Happen?

The reason this happens is actually pretty simple. Let’s look at the problem in 2d where we have a light source (the sun), the ground to cast a shadow on, and an object casting a shadow:

Now let’s think about where the ground would be completely in shadow. We can draw a line where all the ground to the left is completely in shadow. This is the point where all the ground to the right can “see” the sun, but all the ground to the left cannot see it. This area is called the “umbra” which is latin for shadow.

Now let’s think about where the ground would be completely lit up. We can draw a line where all the ground to the right is completely lit up by the sun. This is the point where all the right to the right can “see” the sun completely, but all the ground to the left has some amount of the sun obscured, so can only see some of the sun if any of it.

This leaves us with the area in the middle of the two where the ground can see some of the sun, but not the whole sun. This area is called the “penumbra”, which in latin literally means “almost shadow”. (You may remember the “pen” prefix from peninsula which is also latin, meaning “almost an island”)

So the penumbra is where the soft edge of a shadow is, but how is this related to distance?

Here is the situation when the shadow casting (brown) object gets closer to the ground. Note how the penumbra is a lot smaller.

Here it is when the shadow casting (brown) object gets farther away from the ground. Note how the penumbra gets larger!

Distance isn’t the only thing that can affect penumbra size though. Here you can see that a larger light makes a larger penumbra.

Here you can see how a smaller light makes a smaller penumbra.

If a light was infinitely small (a point light), it would not make a soft shadow edge, no matter how far or close the shadow was to the thing casting the shadow. While point lights do exist in computer graphics, you likely would still want to make a soft shadow for them if you are able to, as point lights can’t exist in real life.

If you’ve never noticed this property of shadows before, you will probably never be able to un-see this.

This is what it’s like being a graphics programmer (or an artist, photographer, etc, I’m sure!) – looking at and understanding how things like this work completely changes how you see the world. Lately, everywhere I look, I’m checking out the reflections and thinking about SSR (screen space reflections). Just check out the cool reflections below, that you probably didn’t even think anything of when you first saw the picture!