you dont seem to get it, you cant make a shadow mapping shader, thats not what shaders do. you really need to get a little more expirienced before you think your ready to make your own dynamic shadow solution.

Sphere gives you dynamic soft shdadows..

lostclimate, soft shadows are possible with a shader, like matt said sphere does it, it's not impossible, everything is possible, you just need to know how to implement it and have the right hardware to run it, however, at the guy needing help, check the wiki, the link is at the top of the page, if that doesn't help, click matt's sig, from what you say it seems you haven't looked enough, if you can't find anything in the forum, check the link or downloads page, they are accessible at the top of the page, if you still can't find anything, wiki is the place to be, and if you still can't find anything, if you have searched and searched, then post your problem, don't post it as soon as you have an error, try to find a solution first.

edit: i do not mean this post as offesive, i'm trying to help, you need to listen when someone tells you how you can fix it, if i have to post a direct link to what i'm talking about i will....

ok, i didnt say it the way i meant it, I should say it this way, that's probably not the particularly best way to go about it, better to use sphere, because its already finished, and it seems he thinks shaders are meant for just shadows... i was trying to get the point across to him that there not.

oooooooooooooohhhhhh, for a second i was wondering, i wish i knew how to fix this problem as well, i also can't get shadows on models

seems unless you want to learn some extensive directx knowledge that you'll just have you use stencil or nothing because the shadows your talking about are called z-buffer shadows, they dont wrap around edges, they will work on a model if your standing on it, but it will look just like a flat plane protruding from the characters feet, it wont contour to the surface.

Exactly. I managed to get the shadow to appear as a flat plane (i think it's about changing shadow_mode only), but the "flat plane shadow" thing is just not good enough.

I've tried out Sphere Demo, and i noticed it can cast a shadow from one (static) barrel model onto another. I'll have to try making them move too.

I'm not sure if this would help you, but perhaps you should take a look at one of the shader contributions in one of the AUM magazines. Matt Aufderheide has contributed one of his shaders for soft shadows. It's not perfect, as in it produces some errors and unexpected results on my pc, but the basis is there. Perhaps you can try to improve that shader?

The AUM magazine download, look for Exquisite Contributions

Cheers

Thanks for mentioning that. I did try that already. Problem with that shader is that it produces a shadow on a flat "plane". So if i want to cast shadow of one frog onto another, i will not get natural shadows which follow the "curves" of the frog, but a flat plane shadow, which will be in mid-air.

My main problem is that i need to be able to cast "nicely_follow_the_curves" shadows from one model onto another. Nothing but stencil shadows works that way, and it kills the frame rate too much (nVidia 7600, ...).

Thanks once again!