terrain shadows
Author
im about to implement some shadows in my terrain engine... its a pretty large landscape with tress, grass and rocks... and im a bit unsure which shadowing technique to use... my only light source is the sun... i thinking about ortho cascaded shadowmaps... but i dont know if that the best and simplest solution...
Yeah PSSM/CSM works really nicely. Very good example of PSSM on this page: http://appsrv.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~fzhang/pssm_project/
For just terrain (shelf) shadows google "Ambient aperture lighting". Fast, easy and good-looking, What else can you ask for? There's also an example in nVidia's FX composer 2 (beta).
I have had good success with logarithmic shadows in my own project..very easy to implement and works in all cases..(with some artifacts but not much);
Author
Quote:Original post by Matt Aufderheide
I have had good success with logarithmic shadows in my own project..very easy to implement and works in all cases..(with some artifacts but not much);
logarithmic shadows? could u give me some more info on that?
EDIT:: googled didnt find any papers on it.. that were free
I second looking into "Ambient Aperture Lighting" - there's a copy of the paper on ATI's developer site I believe. It's simple, cheap and looks quite good.
Crysis is apparently using variance shadow maps for their terrain shadows which seems like a good idea as the depth complexity of terrain is fairly low. VSMs can also be combined with other techniques such as PSSM to good effect.
Crysis is apparently using variance shadow maps for their terrain shadows which seems like a good idea as the depth complexity of terrain is fairly low. VSMs can also be combined with other techniques such as PSSM to good effect.
Author
Quote:Original post by AndyTX
I second looking into "Ambient Aperture Lighting" - there's a copy of the paper on ATI's developer site I believe. It's simple, cheap and looks quite good.
Crysis is apparently using variance shadow maps for their terrain shadows which seems like a good idea as the depth complexity of terrain is fairly low. VSMs can also be combined with other techniques such as PSSM to good effect.
thx.. ive looked into Ambient Aperture Lighting and that seems quite good... also VSM seems interesting... but that goes for terrain...
for grass i thought PSSM or CSM.. or this logarithmic one... however which one would be simplest to implement?
Quote:Original post by Dragon_Strike
for grass i thought PSSM or CSM.. or this logarithmic one... however which one would be simplest to implement?
Do you need to see the individual shadows for each blade of grass? That's gonna be pretty ugly no matter which method you use as grass is *way* too high frequency. I'd suggest looking into a probabilistic method for computing occlusion from grass (I believe several recent grass papers have done something similar).
Author
Quote:Original post by AndyTXQuote:Original post by Dragon_Strike
for grass i thought PSSM or CSM.. or this logarithmic one... however which one would be simplest to implement?
Do you need to see the individual shadows for each blade of grass? That's gonna be pretty ugly no matter which method you use as grass is *way* too high frequency. I'd suggest looking into a probabilistic method for computing occlusion from grass (I believe several recent grass papers have done something similar).
that would be an option... however since im using several different plants its not rly what im looking for... wouldnt it be possible to do alot of blurring on the shadows to hide the artifacts? sharp shadows arent required...
Quote:Original post by Dragon_Strike
that would be an option... however since im using several different plants its not rly what im looking for... wouldnt it be possible to do alot of blurring on the shadows to hide the artifacts? sharp shadows arent required...
You can't blur standard shadow maps and expect to get proper (or even reasonable) results.
You *can* blur variance shadow maps, but you'll tend to just lose the shadows altogether if they are very high frequency (i.e. grass). That said, combining VSM with some sort of ambient occlusion approximation might get you what you need.
VSMs also have the advantages of hardware filtering, multisampling (if supported) and alpha blending (nice for foliage). Combined with PSSM they might give very good results, although I haven't tried them with a scene like you describe.
This topic is closed to new replies.
Advertisement
Popular Topics
Advertisement