This is an image from my first Direct3D development project. My ultimate (if ambitious) vision for this project is to eventually create an immersive and calming island scene for an observer to explore using sound, visuals and physics. It is currently in an early stage, but it's at the point where some nice scenes can be observed. This is one of them, showing a screenshot of a sunset from a perspective standing in the shallow water.

This screenshot shows off nice alpha blending effects (the surface of the water is animated) and shadowing and lighting corresponding to a setting sun. The models are basic but they fit the scene quite well.

I have been motivated to work on this project because I have been programming in C++ for a number of years now, and I have got to the point where I want to have more graphical capability available to me than offered by basic libraries such as GDI. I also find myself wishing that I could just use my computer's 3D processing power to play a 'game' in which the only aim is to explore and relax rather than progress through levels and attain specific goals, hence why I used this island scene idea to get started with my first custom 3D graphics project.

Some of the lessons I learned during this project are 3D graphics programming! I also learned that the true solution to a problem is usually the simplest one, and that simple experimentation often yields nice results.

Click here to view the iotd

Your images look quite noisy, do you have mipmapping enabled?

Other than that, nice work! Keep it up.

Consider using alpha testing on the leaf and frond textures when generating the shadow map, it might look cool!

Great work by the way! Save money on a vacation to the Bahamas, you can just go there virtually!

Thanks!

I don't have mipmapping enabled at the moment - it it something I was thinking about in the future though, once I sort out some more pressing things!

I had thought of alpha testing for the shadows, but I don't really know how to get it to work! I have of course enabled it for the leaves themselves, but if I do the same thing when rendering the shadows, they just look the same. To create the shadows I'm using a matrix to flatten the objects onto the floor, and I then apply a shadow material to them to make them the right colour. Is it possible to use alpha testing with this method?

Thanks!

Tell me more about your shadow material? Do you still sample the original diffuse texture and just "grey" out the colors? Or are you just swapping a dark texture for all the original diffuse textures and sampling from that?

I'm rendering the shadow using the original textures applied to the tree, but applying a D3DXmaterial to it with diffuse set to (0, 0, 0, 0.4). I started a thread here which has a picture of what's happening:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/639155-combining-alpha-testing-and-blending/

Thanks :)

Have a look at shadow buffers, I find them easier to understand than stencil shadows which I think is what you're describing. They also intuitively handle overlapping shadows and you can so some nice filtering with them to achieve soft shadows and other effects.

I'd really like to be able to use proper shadow buffers, and I get the concept (render from the light's point of view, store the depth info to see which areas are in shadow, etc...) but I think it would be a large leap beyond my current level, and there are a few other things I'd like to get sorted first!