Just some shadows...

After working the whole day to get this done until now, I finally did it and upladed this small and hopefully easy to use and usefull collection of different shadowmapping techniques which consists of:
- Frustum splitted PCF sun shadows
- Omnidirectional pointlightshadows using cubemaps and VSM for up to 4 lights
- Spotlights using VSM including a projected image for faked shadows for up to 2 lights
- A projectionshader to project a cubemap for faked pointlights for up to 2 lights

To use it, you will need the latest public A7 Comm version and a graphicscard which supports shadermodel 3.0 and floating point textures.

The terms of use are the following:
- Don´t claim this to be your work.
- Don´t sell just the shadows as the main product
- I would love to see my name mentioned in your finished projects using this,
but I won´t make you to do so.
- If you are gaining money with a project using this or you just want to support me,
it would be awsome if you would do a small donation over my website: www.ssmasters.de
I am also always interested in good looking artwork.


And I of course also have to thank several people:
- Loopix, for the treemodel of which you can find even more on his website: www.loopix-project.com
- www.dexsoft-games.com for this awsome crate model.
- I have to thank all those people testing and commenting on my work and
even more those who helped me to get this where it is now:

* BoH_Havoc, who helped me to get started with shadow mapping.
* ChrisB, who is one of those very rare people of the community
who is able to help with the hardest parts.
* Hummel, who is always there to test my stuff and to find out
why it doesn´t work for him.
* DoC, who already liked to play around with the earliest versions of my shadows.
* Machinery_Frank, who always does some usefull comments and
even allowed me to use a small testlevel of him for testing puposes.
You can find a lot of his and some other great modellers work at www.dexsoft-games.com

You can find the download as well as some more information and screenshots of this on my new and still very empty homepage: http://slin.sl.ohost.de/viewproject.php?lang=en&project=ShadowCollection

I whish you a merry christmas and a happy new year and hope that you´ve got some use for this!
Nils Daumann

looks great, i get an error though, "crash in pp_add"

EDIT: okay no error, but now nothing happens when i try to make a point light

Looks wonderful. You are very generous Slin. Thank you!

Nice work! That screenshot with the tree looks very impressive ^^

Can't wait to try it out!

Cheers,
Adoado

That's what I call a christmas gift!
I'm going to try it out right away...

Thanks Slin, great work.

great work, slin
thank you very much

AWESOME!! it's really a good christmas present .

Santa Clause is mediocre in comparison to you.

Thank you very much!

Thank you for your hard and impressive work Slin

I try it out. The most things work very well. But I got a bug. I have a terrain which has a skin with an alpha channel and the shadows of the entities BELOW the terrain are still visible.

When I try the testlevel with 7.60 I get
"Shadows\Shadow.dll - can't load DLL - any key to abort"

Any ideas?

Damn Slin why you post so a bad screenshot from my level ^^ soo here so it must like
and thx for the script

Everything looks very good!

At first I thought the cube projection in the demo has some z beating problems but then I realized that its due the the small lines on the cube. Very impressive!

Engine ver 7.6, GeForce 8600

@fogman: you need the latest directX (August 2008)!

Great Contribution Slin!
Merry christmas!

Thanks for your comments so far
But really the sunshadows are still very weak, they are only good looking on some screenshots in some rare situations :P
The dll not loading seems to be caused by IE7, I am still figuering out how to solve it. I compiled the dll with the dx sdk from April 2006, so an outdated dx version shouldn´t be the problem.

If your system can´t load the dll, please try this one: http://files.filefront.com/Shadowrar/;12756148;/fileinfo.html
I am now trying to fix the problem reported by oliver2s and will upload a new version of the whole project then.

Awesome contribution Slin!

Will give it a try now

Merry Christmas!


[edit]
found a small bug: The whole thing only works with default camera.arc. This shouldn't be too hard to fix though.

Apart from that: GREAT work!

"If your system can´t load the dll, please try this one:"...

Works for me!
Really impressive, thank you very much!

Great work Slin
Proper shadow mapping is hard thus I respect the effort which you have putted into this

Cheer and have a nice Xmas !

Frazzle

thank you!

i get a 'crash in pp_add' when i try to use a create_pointlights, when i comment this out the only type that cast shadows are the sun...

Really impressive work and very easy to use. It works immediatly in existing levels and shows great results especially on buildings.
Pictures below show what you get by just adding 2 lines of code to your project!

Thanks a lot for this contribution. This will move 3dgs a huge step forward.

Scene with shadowmapping:



Scene without shadowmapping:

hmmm.. good shadows on GS? thats interesting

I did some minor changes and bug fixing and tried to improve the blurr of the sunshadows, which got now even more buggy than before but with a nicer blur: http://files.filefront.com/ShadowCollectionV2rar/;12820784;/fileinfo.html

@Drew: Could you please send me your acklog via pm?

Ich bekomme den selben "Crash in: pp..." Fehler.

Anscheinend funktionert das Pointlight nicht, wenn man den Shade-C Shader verwendet. Ich denke es liegt am DOF. Weil, wenn ich die Sonne wegnehme, dann ist die Sky-Entity irgendwie transparent und Grau.

nice, just a quick question..... is this normal?




it's the same in both shadow versions.
using a ati HD4800 graphic card, newest directX.

On the last screenshot it is meant to be like that but not on the other two...

radeon cards...

I am willing to bet...I can't even get catalyst to install now days...damn ATI.

any idea what could cause a plain black screen? your demo works, and i think i followed your instructions.


btw. i am creating the level with level_load(""); and additional ent_creates.. is this an issue here?

Here is another little update. The sun is now slowely moving in the demo level (there are some stupid artifacts if it moves faster :P). And I fixed a crash when deactivating the sun shadows.

You can download it here: http://files.filefront.com/ShadowCollectionV3rar/;13357835;/fileinfo.html


I had a lot of issues with ati cards and my shadows in the past, but the version I contributed should basicly even work with those without problems.
@ello: I have absolutely no idea...

The seams come from bad values in the shadow material. Most of the time it's just bias adjustment. I haven't been too much into shadow maps lately, so I can be wrong too

Love the update. Shadow quality has been improved a lot!!!

I'm having troubles with LOD-meshes however - they won't cast shadows. Am I doing something wrong, or are LOD's simply not detected by your plug-in?

Hi,

the new demo runs slower than the previous one and even if the shadow algorithm worked not quite perfect in the last V2 demo, the shadows in the current version are even worser. I have lots of clipping, "holes" in the shadows and they are very crispy.

Plus, everything looks very flat and not sophisticated.

Here are two shots, stitched together in one image:



My specs are:

• Windows Vista Business 32 Bit
• AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile Technology 1.60 GHz
• 1 GB RAM
• NVidia Geforce Go 7400

Hi, I have a bug

when is start the map my screen is only black, can someone help me?

sorry for my bad english

My specs:

- Windows Vista 64 Bit
- Intel Core2 Duo 2,6 GHz (oc 3GHz)
- 4 GB RAM
- NVidia Geforce 8800 GTX

i have also the clipping problems:

My specs:

- Windows XP 32 Bit
- Intel Celeron 3.06 GHz
- 1,5 GB RAM
- NVidia Geforce 7300 GS

with my 7600 gs i have the same clipping problems,
but with my 9800 gtx+ no clipping problems and it run really smooth.

can someone give me a working Download link???
The links from Slins Homepage are only directing me to filefronts home site..

Here is a new one: http://www.slindev.com/files/projects/ShadowCollectionV3.zip

thx ^^

I really like this shadows, i wanted long time ago shadow what uses shadow maping algorithm( in "shader workshop" shadow only from sun ), especially i impressed what you show me how to create depth buffer for translucent object,PCF filtering ,cubemap rendering, and other useful code stuff, Slin thx you a lot.

Super Slin. Es sieht besser und besser aus. Weiter so.

Slin is there any way to make this great shadows work with c-script? Or may be there is another shadows just 4 c-script?

Yes, but it is a lot of work which I won´t explain and also won´t do myself.

I btw fixed an error of the dll a few days ago, which increased the shadow quality a lot.

@HeelX: I finally found out what causes such problems. I am setting an orthogonal projection matrix to clip polygons which aren´t visible on the shadowviews away. Th problem is that I am just setting the views arc value to a value which kinda worked for me, but doesn´t always...

Is there any alternative for it in c-script?

Demo won't run here. All I get is a brick wall and then it hangs.

@Nidhogg: Press 0 to move...
@3run: I don´t think so.

Ah, There we go.
Some areas around 45fps average around 60fps.
Consistant screen flickering and artifacts.

What exactly is flickering?

I've been trying to do screen captures on the flickers but they won't show on the captured image. I'll see if I can do a recording.

I managed to do a recording, The quality isn't all that crash hot but you can see the problem. Also the flickering only happens in a window, when I switched to full screen via ALT-ENTER the flickering went away. The other only problem maybe would be to try to increase the frame rate. I don't how how you initilize the plugin but maybe a PROC LATE or shadow_stencil=4 "Or is this done via initilization in our scripts. Overall I reckon it's a great contrib.

Here is the link to the flicker problem Flicker Problem

I got this flickering too (in the demo level).
In my game the shaders don't even work. I get a completely black screen. Nothing is visible but the panels.

The download link doesn't work....says file is currently unavailable

There are actually some "bugs" and the shadows are not perfect at all. I started working improving them again some time ago, so that I already get better results, however that still needs some work until I will release it, if I ever will get it that far.
Thus here is just a new downloadlink: http://www.slindev.com/files/codes/ShadowCollectionV3.zip

Dear Slin, please contribute the last version of your great shadows I've seen just some great pictures on your IP, called "SHADOW COLLECTION V11" and so on. They are so great Slin, please contribute them.