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As the title already explains I have a shadow in my render without an actual object which casts that shadow. The shadow only shows depending on where my camera is positioned and even when I disable the used lights in my scene. Picture 1 shows how the object should look with the used lighting. Picutre 2 shows the exact same object but I rotated the camera around it. Picture 3 shows how that shadow increases while I rotate further around the object. Picture 4 shows that there clearly is no other object in the way of the light and that camera itself could not cast the shadow on my object.

Object with correct lighting/shadows

Shadow Position 1

Shadow Position 2

Setup of camera and lights

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  • $\begingroup$ What does your material node setup look like? $\endgroup$ – Christopher Bennett Jun 21 '20 at 19:02
  • $\begingroup$ Here you can see my material node setup: link $\endgroup$ – Tignite Jun 22 '20 at 8:43
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    $\begingroup$ So I went in there and played with some settings. It looks like the normal input is causing that problem because if I cut the connection the shadow vanishes! $\endgroup$ – Tignite Jun 22 '20 at 8:51
  • $\begingroup$ Yeah, I caught that. It's in my answer. $\endgroup$ – Christopher Bennett Jun 22 '20 at 9:06
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I think this should solve your problem: Unless there is some special reason you're using "object", "generated" is usually the best texture coordinate to use for procedural textures. Secondly, if you're using a B&W value as a normal map, it should be run through the height input of a bump node first. See below:

Setup

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  • $\begingroup$ There is no real reason for that. I think I copied that from somwhere else because I'm a beginner and don't really know what I'm doing there. ^^ That definitely did the trick and that weird shadow is gone, so thanks for both the advices! $\endgroup$ – Tignite Jun 22 '20 at 13:24
  • $\begingroup$ @Tignite One thing to look out for is connecting sockets (the inputs/outputs of the nodes) to sockets of the same colour.The colour represents the type of data it handles. In your example you were connecting a Grey (scalar) output to the Blue (vector) Normal input of the shader node. This was producing an invalid surface normal which - as Christopher rightly pointed out - was the principle cause of the "shadow". Stick with connecting 'same colour' and you'll avoid some (but not all) of this kind of problem. $\endgroup$ – Rich Sedman Jan 23 at 9:05

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