Hello!

It's been a long day of trying to get shadow mapping implemented. It started off pretty well and I'm in a good spot, only this little texture sample is causing me some issues. I'm trying to use SampleCmpLevelZero to get some free PCF but the function returns 0, no matter what I put into it.

My shadow map looks good, and if I do a simple check then everything works out pretty well. For example this piece of code comes out with some good output and shows that there is some depth information that makes sense in both the local pixel depth and the shadowMap.

float depthFromLightToThisPixel = pIn.ShadowPosH.z;
float depthFromLightToClosestPixel = gShadowMap.Sample(sam, pIn.ShadowPosH.xy).r;
float depthDiff = abs(depthFromLightToThisPixel - depthFromLightToClosestPixel);
return float4(0.9f, 0.9f, 0.9f, 1.0f) * depthDiff;

float depthFromLightToThisPixel = pIn.ShadowPosH.z;
float shadow = gShadowMap.SampleCmpLevelZero(ShadowSampler, pIn.ShadowPosH.xy, depthFromLightToThisPixel);
return float4(0.9f, 0.9f, 0.9f, 1.0f) * shadow;

I've come across a few possible issues and I think I've narrowed it down to either;

1.Sampler is incorrect.

2.Texture format is incorrect.

Here's the sampler. (BorderColor just for testing)

SamplerComparisonState ShadowSampler
{
Filter = COMPARISON_MIN_MAG_LINEAR_MIP_POINT;
AddressU = BORDER;
AddressV = BORDER;
AddressW = BORDER;
BorderColor = float4(0.5f, 0.5f, 0.5f, 1.0f);
ComparisonFunc = LESS_EQUAL;
};

depthFromLightToClosestPixel = gShadowMap.SampleLevel(sam, 0, pIn.ShadowPosH.xy).r;

Then I just get 1.0 returned. Solid white instead of solid black. Perhaps this is the root cause.

I'm pretty stumped at the moment as to what's causing this. Hopefully I haven't overlooked anything and left out any information. Thanks for reading! Time for me to eat!

Amazing what some food can do. So after hours spent on this I finally have my answer.

Don't create your samplers in the .fx file. It's dependent on the Effects library and so it won't actually set the parameters that you ask for, just the default values.

So yeah, moving the sampler description into code and setting it there fit everything right up.

For some similar issues you can look here at least.

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/625963-samplecmplevelzero-just-returns-black/

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/633909-how-to-use-texture-samplers/

And just to show that RenderDoc was trying to warn me of my downfall, here's some shots with the unset and set sampler. They've even gone and highlighted it in red for me

I had noticed this earlier in my debugging but I dismissed it too easily. I guess I didn't trust my tools. Lesson learned.

[attachment=26724:SamplerFixed.png]

[attachment=26725:SamplerWarning.png]