Hello, After a good week of tinkering and cursing the lack of documentation of the Managed API, I finally got my stencil shadow volumes working. I was quite happy with the result, the only little problem I have with my initial test setup is that I have some 'dithering' in the shadow when the shaded object is very light, like the terrain in this picture: If you look closely, you'll see the little 'unshaded' pixels in the shaded region. This may be related to my second problem, but if it is a seperate problem and anyone knows how to fix it, pray tell :) Now on to my real, serious problem. My shadow volumes seem to be generated correctly for 'convex' objects, like the torus and the teapot. When I tried to shadow a 'concave' object (hope I got the terminology right :), like the mushroom top in the next picture, the volumes got completely screwed as you can see below (the mesh is a geosphere, with the bottom 'pushed in'). The effect:
And the volumes:
I don't know if this problem is just a limitation of the stencil shadow volume approach, or if I did something wrong with creating the volumes. I translated Kevin Harris' shadow volumes tutorial from Codesampler.com to C# and I'm quite certain my translation is correct. I can't test my mesh with the tutorial code since it uses a different vertex format, so I'm a bit stomped. Here's the code I use to generate the shadow volumes: [Download here], ShadowVolume class only, zipped (I had to put this in an external file, because the source tags seems to mess up my C# code, omitting stuff etc). Is my problem indeed a limitation of the shadow volume approach, or should I take another look at my volume generation code? By the way, feel free to use my ShadowVolume class if you want, but please post any fixes and/or improvements in this thread. Well, thanks again in advance! :) [Edited by - remigius on August 26, 2005 3:21:30 AM]

No one? Not even someone who can tell me whether or not my problem is a known limitation of stencil shadow volumes? :)

Incredible how a day away from the computer can help solve stomping problems :)

I realized that my ShadowVolume class assumes the mesh uses a PositionNormalTextured format. For the additional tests I didn't bother to texture the meshes, so the Panda Xporter smartly used another format, which screwed up the reading of the vertices needed for the shadow volume. Ergo:



So my ShadowVolume class is correct for meshes with the PositionNormalTextured format. Again, feel free to download it if you want to take a crack at creating shadow volumes in Managed DX. It's quite efficient and it doesn't require shaders.

If anyone knows a good way to lock multiple (preferably all) vertex formats for processing, you're quite welcome to have a go at my code :)

Edited for future reference:

A complete sample project on creating z-pass shadow stencil volumes on the CPU can be found at our MDXInfo site near the bottom of this page.

[Edited by - remigius on June 10, 2006 2:21:34 AM]