soft shadows?

Please look at the current games and even at render pictures. You will notice very fast: Realism does not come mainly from polygons or textures. It comes in the most cases from lighting. Lights and shadows are the key.

Take a good scene an analyze what you see. I do that very often since I do texture creating at the moment. The same texture looks dull, non-metallic and flat without lighting. Now comes the light, a normal map, a specular map and even a depth map - the texture begins to look realistic and it starts to reflect light in certain spots.

With added shadows the scene becomes almost real.

This little story just tells you that real artists especially need one tool: lights and shadows to make professional scenes. So I understand DEX very much. This is the part what makes the artwork impressive. No matter how many good scripting functions are in the engine.

What does that mean for A6/A7? We need for future updates static and dynamic lights in combination with shaders (normal and parallax mapping with specular highlights). I am very happy that Conitec is going this way now. They want to provide shaders in a template and they want to improve the scene management to use shaders on top of level geometry. So it could become what I have in mind.

But DEX is still missing shadows on terrain. Did you ever create a terrain with shadows? I did. It is a big amount of work. When you use the template shader then you have to paint the shadows or you have to generate them in another tool like Freeworld3D, Gile(s) or in your rendering application. After that you import all in WED. You do not see the tiled textures and you have to place models almost blind.

Did you ever check IceX2 (a tool from a forum user). This one shows how it can be done. It is a terrain in-game editor that places objects, paints terrain and calculates shadows for the hills (but unfortunately not for level or model geometry).

At the end you got my vote for the best lighting and shadow system available

Regards,
Frank

Our policy was so far that all A6 main features should be able run on 1.1/1.3 hardware. This required so far that shadows run on the CPU. Users with not-so-new hardware are grateful for that.

As mentioned, a shadow mapping template is now planned, and I don't even need to get bored for writing it - on the contrary, this would be fun. However I'm having some more issues on my task list at the moment. Shadows are important, but other things are important too. We've recently hired a new programmer - Alexej - and are looking for another one, but I guess I won't have time for the shadow template within the next two months.

I hope this answers your questions.

The easyest thing would be to make a shadowbaker
within WED, that accounts for BSP Blocks and (chosen) models,
and also take the lightinformation from the levelligts.

This is enough information to create a shadowmap for the inserted
terrain, and automaticall save this shadowmap as skin
on the terrain (make a copy of it)

This way the shadowed terrain is fast and looks quite good,
and is easy to implement for users.
Just insert a terrain into a level, assign it as shodowterrain and
let a renderfunction create its shadowmap.

There is no need to have a dynamic terrainshadow, If
one still used static BSP Blocks.

Either all dynamic Models and then dynamic shadow with a shader,
or Using Blocks, and having static shadows then for the terrain too.

I will repeat myself: Shadows and lighting are most important in order to sell game. I alreayd explained. You can make good game but when publisher sees poor shadow on terain you are doomed, and game is rejeted, I am sure about that.
So, JCL please rewrite your TODO list and place shadows on first place. We really have descent engine now, and it is a really pitty that shadows on terrain are so bad, practically non existent.
I ask you again to write exactly what and when you will do that we get shadows on terain, or some shadow baker like Democles said
Thank you

Static shadows and dynamic shadows are completely different things. Terrain shadows are of course possible with any hardware, and have nothing to do with the shader templates. They are on our high priority list as you can see in the forecast page. A terrain shadow generator will be developed for the Map compiler as soon as the current task with the map compiler is finished.

I cannot find anything about terrain shadows on the forecast page..?!

If a shadowmapper will be included that is good.

I dont think that a baked shadow is "faked",
as the lighning on blocks would be "faked" in this sense too,

it is just the application of the same concept of creating static shadows
to the terrain, as it is to the BSP-blocks.

But how will the calculated shadowmap be stored?
In the terrain directly, by altering the skin (and making a copy of
the terrain with the new skin?)
Or as a seperate created skintexture, that can be applied to the terrain manually?
(To rework certain areas, like adding shadow/light jitter for leaves of trees,
and some fixes for the shadow)

Will the shadowmapper account for models too, or just the Blocks?

There should be a specific multitextureshader for the shadowed terrain too,
it works with the MT-shader from the templates,
but maybe a special shader, that keeps the terrain to
have the exact lighning from
the ambient light brighnes of the BSP Level as a minnimum, to
the sunlight Brightness as a Maximum.
So that the shadows will have the ambient light brighness, and
the sunny parts, that sunlightbrigness.

I would prefer a special single shadowmap. That can be used for overaying another texture or for a shader (e.g. the blue channel in the template shader).

The method can even fully support the template terrain shader and bake the shadow directly into the blue channel of the bitmap. We can still extract that channel with "The GIMP" or "Photoshop".

Regards,
Frank

There should be the option to save the shadowmap
onto the terrainskin (blue channel)
and manually to a file.

Currently the skintextures can only be extracted as 16Bit Texture
from the skins in MED, so
maby one needs a 24Bit TGA for editing.

In my view static shadow maps of all kinds need to be gotten rid of completely.

Why?

In this view, there is no need for BSP Blocks with static lights either,
since this is the same concept:
Create a static lighning, that is rendered once, and needs not
renderingtime ingame (it just needs to be displayed).

Not every game needs dynamic shadows. If the gamelight / dayligt does not change,
and the lights dont move, there is no need to make the lighning dynamic.
The only problem that will persits, is that the shadows of units and Models will
look different than the shadows by blocks...

I also can imagine that dynamic lights and shadows will be the future. Most shaders have only one purpose: creating dynamic lighting. This concept even uses normals, heights and specularity today. The gpu's do all that real-time.

Currently static light maps are a good way to create moody environments. If I would make a game now then I want to have static shadows as well. This ensures to run smoother today.

But the future will probably be real-time. It will even make much things easier: You don't need light map compilition. You can place a light in a real-time editor and you see results instantly.

If all shadowing it rendered on the fly, the engine
needs much higher machines, than without it.

This is a hobby/indy engine after all,
so games with it should keep to the more high-fps
techniques.

Matt is always several light years ahead of us .

While he's right that precalculated lighting will eventually disappear, at the moment - and also for the next couple of years - it will still be used by most major engines. Even Microsoft just began to implement precalculated lighting in DX9 and DX10.

I dont think i'm too futuristic here. Engines like Doom3 have had this for years. CryEngine 2, Unreal 3, etc will all use dynamic lighting and shadows.

Some precalculation can be useful for such things as Global illumination and so on, but for standard lighitng and shadows there's no substitute for dynamic methods.

Why not just add dynamic stuff and leave the static things as they are once they are finished?

Naw, he's not lightyears ahead of us, just sees in FPV(First Person View), also known as "first person shooter view". It's a syndrome full of effects, and other razzle dazzle.

Unfortuantly, it will be a while until all games can switch to a fully dynamic lighting system, mostly due to speed reasons. I'd be doing things a differently if speed was no issue. As well, creating art to properly work with dynamic lighting is alot of work, a fair amount more than art developed in mind for static lightmaps.

Actually, both take a lot of time if you want to get it done right. If only people who use the fill tool would try to spend more than just half an hour on one skin painting, just take the time needed to make a proper skin. You know, add lot's of (necessary) details, and would look for some general painting tutorials, etc. ...

It seems just a handful of people are prepared to spend some time learning this, but it could greatly improve the overall quality of the games shown here on the forums .. I'm not critisizing anyone here, I've experienced myself that learning to digitally paint costs a LOT of time. (Still not done learning.)

Some people seem to think that shaders make a model look good, but infact it's the textures for 90+ % that makes it look good. Shaders can only make it a bit better, or way way worse. (I definately agree that bump mapping or parallax mapping and perhaps even specular mapping improve a model a lot, Frank_g's textures are a good example, however even there you see that it's actually the artwork that's making it great).

Cheers

Normal mapped models do not always look like plastic. If you ever created your own normal mapped models then you will know that you can control the metallic / plastic look with the specularity map. If there is no specularity then it would even look very dull and not plastic.

When you look into the latest showcase shots of my textures then you will see some parts that have more specularity than other parts. If you use that wisely then you can have a quite realistic look. And there is no shader to blame.

And Matt's statement with the flat color maps is right. You have to create them flat otherwise it will look wrong in the engine. You cannot paint a shadow in the color map and after that the real-time shadow will add to that. Often they can look contrary to each other.

Color maps should have only: colors. Lighting and highlights will come through normal and specularity maps. That is what 3d artists did in still render images for several years. And now it comes in real-time.

Shaders are a programmers attempt to kill the texture artist. "Bahhh, no more detail, keep it bland, the code will do the lighting! Let displacement mapping do the 3d work; wheres my procedural textures?! Grrr..." Conspiracy I tell ya.

The problem is you have to create a second model that is much more detailed for the normal map. This takes longer then creating a detailed 2d texture. But, as programs advance further, perhaps this wont be such a big deal. I've no problem with the look of static lightmaps, and perfer them in many situations. Half-Life2 looked better and more realistic than Quake4, although Quake4 felt stylized, which is nice. Perhaps one day when you can have the texture resolutions found in Half-life2, combined with per-pixel lighting found in Quake4, things will look very realistic. Ever notice how low-res everything is in a game that went for the realstic feel(Oblivion), now imagine this same with very high resolutions, the plastic effect should be gone.

Okey, I may have exagerated a bit indeed, colors need to be quite flat, but then again, why are there doom3 mods out there able to minimize the plastic look? I've seen their skin textures (infact I've worked on some of them some time ago (search for the 'Doom can do it too' threads) and specular maps too, it doesn't quite look the same.

Again, i'm not dissing the Doom3 engine here. The per-pixel bumpmaps, diffuse, specular, and light-filter cubemaps and stencil shadows volumes for all lights are pretty impressive.

Cheers