Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources?

Posted By: Matt_Coles

Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 02:46

When the implementation for soft shadows comes out would it be possible to have multiple shadows cast when multiple light sources are nearby?

thanks

matt
Posted By: zazang

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 03:35

Yeah I second this one.Would be great for a soccer game
Posted By: Orange Brat

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 03:39

That feature used to be in Forecast under Light Management. It either in development, delayed, or dead. As always, Forecast features can disappear at any time and never see the light of day. The "modern drag & drop" WED UI always vanished.
Posted By: jcl

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 11:16

You can have as many light sources as you want, but the restriction is that every light source is a render process, like an additional view. So the more light sources you use the slower is the rendering.

This is similar for stencil shadows. More light sources mean less frame rate, so we only allowed one light source for stencil shadows.
Posted By: Matt_Aufderheide

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 15:06

Quote:

This is similar for stencil shadows. More light sources mean less frame rate, so we only allowed one light source for stencil shadows.



Of course, yet many game engines support multiple shadow casters...why not let the user choose how many lights cast shadows? Good lighting effects are difficult to achieve without multiple shadows. Modern hardware can easily support several shadow casting lights (Doom3 has no set limit as far as I know, it just adds passes).

I sometimes I am tempted to think Conitec decides to limit functionality because it believes it's users are ignorant (maybe they are right unfortunately).
Posted By: Orange Brat

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 17:02

As Matt stated and as I have stated many times, Conitec should allow the USER to choose which features they want for a given situation. Yes, there are users who will fail but they will eventually catch on.

While more lights and more shadows and more this and more that will slow things down, we aren't living in the year 2000 or the year 199X anymore. The hardware can handle it, and a wise developer is one that will allow this and other features to be toggled on/off in an options menu. H

The ability of my player to cast a shadow from 80 different lights in a room should be my choice and not one that was made for me given there's no reason why this feature shouldn't exist. I know it used to be in Forecast, so it was at least on the table at one time, and IMHO it should be put there again and implemented sooner rather than later.

Shenmue was doing it on the Dreamcast and that was almost 10 years ago (1999).
Posted By: Tobias

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 17:33

It wasn't in the forecast yet, I'm sure because I'm looking there myself every couple of days for news about the shadowmap shader.
Posted By: Orange Brat

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 17:37

As I stated two posts ago, multiple shadows was in forecast for months...maybe even a year or more. It disappeared when the Light Management section went away.

Quote:

That feature used to be in Forecast under Light Management.


Posted By: Matt_Coles

Re: Soft Shadows with Multiple Light Sources? - 09/28/07 20:17

Well I hope that we'll be given a new variable like max_shadows that'll determine the maximum amount of cast shadows per object and light source based on the closest light sources to our models.

@ JCL, would you consider unlocking the max shadows feature from 1, allowing more control of this?
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