What Shadowing techinque should I use?
IIRC in Carmacks keynote on doom3 ... he talks about shadowing in outdoor scenes. He said that even with buffers with resolution of like 2000 x 2000 you get nasty shadows for things like bushes and trees.
for things like bushes maybe a silhouette map could be used along with the shadow map to improve the look..?
Quote:He said that even with buffers with resolution of like 2000 x 2000 you get nasty shadows for things like bushes and trees.
not with TSMs, and with shadow volumes, it's much worse... if you use alpha maps to render the bushes, you get solid bush shadows, without any leaves, and if you model the leaves geometrically to get proper shadows, and have a few bushes, you'll get an awful performance drop...
[Edited by - sBibi on September 15, 2004 8:43:44 PM]
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I am about to leave out shadows all together until ATI/Nvidia get a better method to do it. e.g. fix pbuffers or make it less painful to do... After looking around outside I don't know if I see much shadowing going on with hills and cliffs as much as objects in the outdoors. e.g. trees, telephone poles, bridges ect... If everyone thinks I should make shadows of the terrain also, how can I shadow the objects and the terrain in one pass? I am not seeing this as possible, but would have to use two passes? I am assuming this will have to be done with PSM or somekind of Shadowmap offshoot...
somehow i have the feeling that most shadow implementations are far too complex
just use a shadowmap for outdoor and for other static geometry, a few shadows and one doesn t realize the lag of dynamic shadows due to gunfire and so on since you are busy with gaming
just use a shadowmap for outdoor and for other static geometry, a few shadows and one doesn t realize the lag of dynamic shadows due to gunfire and so on since you are busy with gaming
Yann, I had an idea about shadowing. You know how you use occlusion culling and have low poly models for all your objects to use with it. Well I was thinking if you generated soft shadow volumes using them, then in the immediate area of the viewpoint use localized shadow maps to render the details. You would sorta blend/modulate the shadow maps with the soft shadow volumes and use the result for your shadowing. This way you get high shadowing detail, very little aliasing, high quality broad shadows over the entire map, accurate soft shadows everywhere, and because the shadow volumes are used only on low poly and larger objects, and shadow mapping on a small percentage of the level, I would imagine high performance.
The individuals on the gamedev mailing list just had a very large, expansive talk about the two top shadowing methods. I suggest googling for an archive and reading up (Very informative!)
~Main
~Main
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