Original Post
Hello. I am considering using variance shadow mapping for a game I am making, but from all the articles I have seen light bleeding is really bad in scenes with high depth complexity. This is exactly my case, most likely one of the main features of the game, so in this case I can´t impose limitations on depth complexity.
I´ve read that light bleeding can be remapping the shadow value to make the shadows darker, effectively making light bleeding being reduced to 0. I´ve also heard about storing a maximum depth value in a third channel which contains the maximum depth of the surrounding values, which can be used to early out of the depth test, plus fixing light bleeding. The last one sounds very promising, but how well does it work out in practice? Do the fixes work even with a gaussian blurred depth map (with a max calculation instead for the maximum depth value instead of course)? Variance shadow maps sound very very interesting, but I haven´t seen them much in real games (I think?), which seems to indicate that they have some serious drawbacks. I´d also like to avoid using layered VSM, since that seems to kind of defeat the purpose of them.... >_>
I´ve read that light bleeding can be remapping the shadow value to make the shadows darker, effectively making light bleeding being reduced to 0. I´ve also heard about storing a maximum depth value in a third channel which contains the maximum depth of the surrounding values, which can be used to early out of the depth test, plus fixing light bleeding. The last one sounds very promising, but how well does it work out in practice? Do the fixes work even with a gaussian blurred depth map (with a max calculation instead for the maximum depth value instead of course)? Variance shadow maps sound very very interesting, but I haven´t seen them much in real games (I think?), which seems to indicate that they have some serious drawbacks. I´d also like to avoid using layered VSM, since that seems to kind of defeat the purpose of them.... >_>