Dynamic Actor shadows and bumpmapped terrain

[arnienet]

I thought I'd post some recent stuff I've been doing with dynamic projected and depth tested shadows on a bump mapped terrain. I know there are a few examples on the forum already covering advanced shadows techniques. As I haven't seen an example of it all tied together in this way, and it's taken a very long time to get it all working, I thought I'd post an example for anyone's interest.

There's a video at (10.3mb):

http://www.dawn-world.com/videos/shdwActors_2/shdwActors_2.html

and here's an image:



The video should be at 30fps, but it looks like my GPU can't handle that and the scene rendering). In the video you can see the shadow draw distance is at the equivalent of 30m to show that the light camera is moving with the actor / camera around the scene. It also shows the depth testing of the tavern, as the model is sunk in the ground to allow for sloped terrains (no corners hanging in the air). I know it's a basic example and I'm going to introduce filtering and PSSM at some point, but it's good to have a working example to build on at the moment.

[Dimple]

 

Glad to see you got it working... and I don't know how I missed this post but I did...

[arnienet]

Thanks Dimple,

I was beginning to think no one was bothered  . It was a lot of work, mainly because I was using a 128 * 128 terrain patch instead of a 256*256 one, which meant all shadow occluders had to be of scale 0.5 and positioned x *0.5 and z *0.5 for some unknown reason (TV3D internals issue). Apart from that the shadow depth shader took a bit of working out, but got there in the end.

The game is almost there, I've been toiling away at it on and off between work, and it's a only few programming days away from a 1st alpha test release, finally. Although it will be a bit ropey, there will be a simple but worthwhile basic mmo gameplay for testing.

I see this as the brick wall climbed over, as there should be enough structure to get a basic interest and then I can gradually add in the rest of the planned features for those who are interested. I'm really glad I stuck at it

[Dimple]

 

@ arnienet,

I'm glad you did too! I've got some things of my own, I'm slowly getting together the way I want them and will continue to work toward my own goals. I'll keep watching for your developments as well. Later...