thanks a lot josiah.
is there a way to bake model shadows as well? as you can see here,



map ents and blocks are rendered fine, but models aren't. why? i cannot see an ignore_models-line in your trace. this is strange. please help me.

for simple shapes, like this snowy pine tree, i may rebuild it with inv. blocks



but this is not nice for a whole forest nor for more complex shapes.

You will need to set "polygon = on;" for models either by script or in WEDs
properties for the model, or else the bounding box will be rendered and not the
model! And if you forget to do this and then scale your model, the shadow of the
bounding box will be a small dot, since it dosent scale with the model.

Shadows of models with fine lines may be blurred out, so you may want to blur
them by hand in an image editing program. Also getting good results capturing
finer details like fence rails may reqire a higher resolution of your shadowmap.

To bake the shadows would depend on how you are texturing your terrain. If you
use one large texture per terrain, then in an image editor, you could invert
the shadowmap and use it as a mask on a black layer above your terrain layer.
Adjust the transparency of the layer, and then collapse them into a single image.

You could also use the existing ffp shader in the example or, modify it if you
are using a multi texture shader. The example shader tiles skin 1 but not skin 2
(the shadow map).

I have made fantastic results with sewn together terrains that each use just
one large texture that includes the shadowmap, and a detail mapping shader.

Sorry I didnt include better usage notes!

excellent works fine, thanks a lot!

I modified the wiki terrain shader, I multiply the color result with the alpha map and disable alpha blending.

To create the alpha map I wrote a raytracing function that makes 4 traces per alpha-map pixel to get a rough "darkness factor" for the pixel.

The result looks like this, but is a static shadowmap because it takes ~3 minutes for 500.000 c_trace. O:-)