I am working on a cad program. I would like to know what specific shadowing technique I can use that will produce the best results for self shadowing. Ie shadowing cause by surface features on the mesh. I am only dealing with one mesh, and speed is not vital. I am trying to avoid the general global illumination approaches since their overkill.
I would use the stencil shadow volume technique. It is more accurate than depth-shadow techniques and pretty simple to use, at least on closed geometry.
Thanks, I did not know you could do shadows with the stencil buffer.
A search on this forum for stencil shadows will reveal tons of threads. There’s also a great paper on nvidia’s web site that collects a lot of this information: http://developer.nvidia.com/object/fast_shadow_volumes.html