Hello all, Is it truely faster to use light maps or wouldn't it be faster to implement a precomputed geometric subdivision similiar to the way lighting was done in the OLD doom and quake series, only automate it using basic shadow volumes coliding with the faces, then further subdivide the faces and assign an ambient diffuse value to these vertices? Furthermore, you could assign a theta component to subdivide for a falloff period in the "shadow geometry". Combined with shadow maps, I could see this as a real powerful technique because of the raw processing power of the GPU on most systems. You can then reuse the shadow volumes for real time shadow casting using the Z-Pass or Fail routine(Carmack's reverse), which, in all honesty, is something I would like to avoid for now simply because I'm a lowly little developer running a poor graphics card. The major drawback is that you can not support animated meshs(levels) with this, unless you use Z-Fail/Pass algorithm. Has anyone seen any papers on any material like this? -Ken Noland

Well,

This is a special type of optimization that I need to determine early on in the project, I've already started working on it and it should be done within the next week. I'll publish my results when I'm through, but I'll need some help.

I have a severe hardware limitation, simply because my primary development machine didn't survive the trip from New York to Seattle. I could generate the test application, but I don't have any decent hardware to run it on... any help, anyone???

ahh, but sending detailed textures over the bus can cause extreme performance issues. I tested it out on a VooDoo 5, and it was actually faster adding over 500 polys then it was to do dual textures. I've got a new machine on order... I will have a better machine soon to do my testing on.

Thanks :-)