I was reading another thread which asked about real-time shadowing, and I haven''t really found any comparison on the methods which are available. Can anyone point me in the direction of a comparison document, or tell me of their experience with shadowing? I''ve heard of and read about methods such as OpenGL shadowing extensions, use of the stencil buffers, etc., but I don''t know which are methods are the best, and which ones I''m wasting my time with. I''d really like to be able to do some cool real-time shadows ... Movie Quote of the Week:

"You''ve been eating retard sandwiches again."
- Birdman, Beautiful Girls.Try http://uk.geocities.com/mentalmantle. Seriously. It''s brilliant.
And I just completely redesigned it so it looks even better.
DarkVertex Beta 0.8 available soon!

i think theres a pdf at the nvidia site that compares some methods.

basically the 2 methods most used at the moment are
-stencil shadow volumes (heaps of examples at the nvidia site)
-shadowmap

stencil shadows dont really require any special extenions or even a decent card ( though most only support hardware stencil in 32bit color)
shadowmaps OTOH aint as well supported (its possible to do them on various cards but not really worthwhile u need at least a good radeon/gf3).
personally i favour shadowmaps ( most cg movies use this i think btw eg toystory, shrek etc) over stencil shadow volumes because they have far less caveats.
i believe in 2 years stencil shadow volumes will be dead (doom3 uses them so who knows?)

http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/kea/kea.html
http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/gotterdammerung.html

Mint...thanks zed. I''ll go and find some stencil shadow volumes tutorials ...

Movie Quote of the Week:

"You''ve been eating retard sandwiches again."
- Birdman, Beautiful Girls.Try http://uk.geocities.com/mentalmantle. Seriously. It''s brilliant.
And I just completely redesigned it so it looks even better.
DarkVertex Beta 0.8 available soon!

Thanks, Palidine, I''ll take a look...

Movie Quote of the Week:

"Mr. Madison, what you have just said is one of the most insanely
idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling,
incoherent response were you even close to anything that could
be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now
dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may
God have mercy on your soul."
- The Principal, Billy Madison.Try http://uk.geocities.com/mentalmantle. Seriously. It''s brilliant.
And I just completely redesigned it so it looks even better.
DarkVertex Beta 0.8 available soon!