Quote: it would be cool to have the stencil shadow as a separate material to apply shader there. you could then use displacement or softing to it.
I've suggested this before, but is it possible? my understanding is that the stencil buffer is just drawn onto a transparent screen aligned quad.. but is is true, and could you access this as a texture? my suspicion is that no, this cant be done, simply because i've never seen it in any other game. Since it seems such an obvious way to get soft shadows, i have to assume it's impossible.
