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Alan Wake uses as far as I know Cascaded Shadow maps .. I believe I saw the transition are when I looked at it last time.
Canopy Shadows: these are simple projected textures that do not work with a time of day feature ....
In other words, if your game has a time of day feature you can not use them ... if you are not satisfied with a pretty strange shadow in extreme lighting conditions.
So games that have a time of day feature need dynamic shadow maps .... this is for example Crysis ...
I don't really see the problem with dynamic day night system. You can update your projected shadow maps every few frames / seconds, depending on the movement of the sun, and then they become dynamic. I create now, a few patches around the camera with a projected texture from the trees. These I use as static shadow maps. For a radius of 50m around the camera, I also have a dynamic map, which blends nicely to the static ones. So far this works fine, and shouldn't suffer from day to night I would say ..
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you don't need to store the shadow color as it's usually the same for the whole shadow map. When you project that texture onto the rest of your scene you'd simply look if the projected pixel is not black, if that's true then that point is in shadow. That's not many calculations more than usual canopy shadows and you could use the shadow map for selfshadowing.
Another option for selfshadowing(not physically correct though) would be Ambient Occlusion. That can easily be done in realtime. You just have to render the mesh from several directions into a depth map and then check for every pixel on the surface if it's on those depth maps. In most cases that can be precomputed and stored in a texture(as trees usually don't change that much).
I actually want to store a grey scaled color for my shadows, because it feels like it gives me a nicer shadow.
Farcry:
Mine (in progress :))
But I don't understand how you would use your black white comparison for self shadowing then. Could you give a little bit more explenation about this pls.
Thank and regards,
Kenzo
PS: gonna take a look at the fast scene voxelization now>
