gidday ive maybe invented a technique which does softshadows (it also selfshadows + also handles the bumpmaps, ie each bump casts a shadow)
a quick picture, which u might wanna turn up contrast or something to see the shadow, i still havent worked out the finaer points (time is short at the moment) http://uk.geocities.com/sloppyturds/t5.jpg
(theres no t1.jpg etc there so dont bother looking )
now does anyone know that this sort of thing has been done before as in the past ive thought ive invented things (only to find out later some mother had done then 20 years before )
for the curious
*i dont think this can be done in hardware on a gf2, 85% of the equation can, but ill think a bit more about it so who knows.
*but i see no reason why it cant be done in hardware on more powerful cards (note i dont know exactly what these more powerful cards can do fully so take this with a grain of salt )
*also unfortunatly this aint radiosity (im still working on that)
well, softshadows where done before, with bumps that do shadows, too…
important is how you do it… did you told us?
and about the newer cards… we don’t know eighter if you don’t tell us how (if you don’t want talk open about it, you can drop a mail, you can trust me… hehe )
if 85% fits into gf2, i’m pretty sure it works on gl1.5 hw… dunno, possibly even g3/gf4…
[This message has been edited by davepermen (edited 11-19-2002).]
Heh, Yahoo says on you link …
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Originally posted by SergeVrt:
[b]
Heh, Yahoo says on you link …
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ie, when an object that is in light is in front of an object that is in shadow. The blurring means that the light bleeds over the shadowed object in the background. Looks weird. Any ideas?
On better hardware you can do a weighted blur where each sample is weighted based on it’s depth difference from the centre sample point. This means that blurring doesn’t pass over object edges. I’m on a GF3 though.
The amount of blurring is based on the distance to the camera, so theorically, if you’ve got a big object in front of you that receives a shadow, and a far-away background, the artifacts are minimized (i think you can see that in the first screenshot: the shadows on the trees are “sharp”. Yet these artifacts are still very visible in some conditions… a dark ambiant color makes things even worse. Unfortunately i don’t think there’s a magical solution, i just try to keep things as good as possible
No; actually they don’t even have lighting (not in these shots, i’ve fixed it in a more recent version). When it’s animated you don’t notice shadows anyway.
Originally posted by Ysaneya:
[b]No; actually they don’t even have lighting (not in these shots, i’ve fixed it in a more recent version). When it’s animated you don’t notice shadows anyway.
If you’re not interested in money/patents, i’d just suggest to share with us, at least you could get some opinions on how good it is
Soft shadows do not come without a cost. Is your method fast ? What kind of hardware does it require ( GF3/GF4 only ? ) ? What about the shadows quality ? Is there some artifacts ? From your screenshot it looks like you’re not using the distance to the occluder to sharpen it ? I hope you get my point: there’s tons of ways to do soft shadows in real-time, but they all have different advantages / drawbacks, and i doubt yours is different
> 3 words:
> when
> demo
> out
> and a fourth:
> finally
> ?
Hehe, i’m sorry. My 3D artist is busy (you know how these damn artists are! grr), so he hasn’t completed the test scene. I wanted it to be nicely textured, with bumpmaps and all the stuff, but it’s going slowly. Maybe i should just release what i got so far. Also, for a number of reasons (including: bugged drivers!) i couldn’t use vertex shaders as i wanted, so performance has not improved ( i get around 15 fps on my system: 1.4 Ghz athlon, R8500 + 512 Mb RAM ). Finally i broke some stuff by doing more tests, so i need to fix everything… knowing the number of Radeon users, i was under the impression not a lot of people could run it anyway… and i lack the time to implement it on a GF3/GF4
>>there’s tons of ways to do soft shadows in real-time<<
true + thats the reason im asking
‘does anyone know of any method that does what ive described?’
Ysaneya your method i take it doesnt handle shadows from bumpmaps (thus its a different method)
there are ppl on this board with more 3d knowledge than me eg dorbie,jwatte,cass etc who would surely know if something comparable has been done before (which would save me a lot of time)
ps the reason im not willing to share further info at the moment is cause i have a feeling this is gonna be very big i dont want someone else stealing the credit eg like tesla(or whoever that was)
No, it doesn’t handle bumps shadows. At least if you don’t describe it you could say what are its advantages/drawbacks as well as hardware requirements ?
ps the reason im not willing to share further info at the moment is cause i have a feeling this is gonna be very big i dont want someone else stealing the credit eg like tesla(or whoever that was)[/b]
Well how accurate, compared to existing shadow generation techniques
and global illumination models, does your solution simulate light object
interaction?
If it is as accurate, or even more, I would say your are on to something truly big.
)
(if you don’t want talk open about it, you can drop a mail, you can trust me… hehe 
