You may or may not have read my dynamic 2d soft shadows article, which IMHO is quite nice and gives good results. However the snag with it is that like 3d shadow volumes it requires actual geometry to extrude, so doesn't work for sprites. Now I've got a crazy idea to do a different technique, almost a 2d version of traditional 3d shadow mapping, which would produce similar results but would work for any alpha-tested geometry. So before I start looking into it properly I'm interested in what other techniques there are out there. From what I've seen there is the old method of specifically drawn sprites for shadows, or tile-based LOS methods like those used for fog of war in Baulder's Gate. Gish is the only recent attempt to do it differently, and that just uses hard-edged shadow volumes in 2d (and came out way after my original article [grin]). They don't even attempt to fix the sprite problem - they just don't cast shadows from the sprites. Anyone seen anything new/different that I've missed? Or other thoughts on generating shadows for 2d sprites? Cheers

Anyone? I've been poking around looking for related work, but it almost seems to be a dead area. :( My idea isn't even that complicated, it's just adapting shadow mapping to work in 2d, so I find it hard to belive that no-one else has done it yet.

Quote:Original post by Matt Aufderheide
render your sprite from the camera view to a texture, then map this on a flat quad, which you can then warp by some projection matrix, this would then produce appearance of a correct shadow in many circumstances.

I think you're a little confused - I'm not talking about generating shadows for billboarded sprites in a 3d world (regular shadow mapping would work in that case), but for generating shadows for sprites in an entirely 2d world, and casting those shadows onto the rest of the sprites.

I think one of the difficulties you will face is that most 2D games are not strictly 2D in the mathematical sense. In nearly all 2D games, there is some 3D aspect that is either faked or implied, if only because our brains simply assume it's there.

Taking any two overlapping sprites, and a light-source equidistant from them, how do you decide who shadows who? Ultimately I believe you have to make some assumptions about how things relate in the hidden third dimension.

I also fear that by extracting a shadow from texture data, you will betray its true 2D-ness that we often work so hard to cover up... A Barrel (viewed from the side), for instance, is drawn to appear round even though it is a flat texture. How will you compensate to draw a shadow that appears correct? What about more essoteric shapes like half-barrels or extruded crescents?


All the more power to you if you've come up with a technique that works, but I suspect that the reason you're having difficulty finding an existing example is because the results simply don't warrant the effort required.

hi. just a random thought, since I've been playing with ambient occlusion recently:

for the sprite casting a shadow onto the ground or itself, have 2 textures; a ground texture and a sprite texture (RGB encodes the bent normal in world space either scaled already {so you can use a simple DOT3 computation to get results}, or A can encode the occlusion value). The ground texture can be used to show a soft shadow under the sprite (so it's decaled onto the floor, under the sprite's feet). The sprite texture would be basically the same thing...a bent normal map but for the sprite geometry itself.

This would be for self- and flat ground-shadowing only, so it's probably not what you're looking for, but might look fairly nice with moving lights.

edit: this could look really cool when rendering imposters! render the geometry with the (properly rotated) normal vector stuffed into the color for each vertex!