So in overal, you need to place a model or a geometry block which is invisible and represents your total scene where as there needs to be a collison detection with the invisible scene and your realtime models their collision hulls so eventually the shadows can be calculated and the models will still have collision. At the place of the invisible scene, you map your hand drawn art on a parallel plane so it looks like the shadows interact (contour for example) with the planes but actually it's an illusion.

But I'm still wondering why you won't use the sprites as hand drawn art together with the stencil shadows ^^ ??

Cheers

Frazzle

You have the concept correct; however:

Quote:

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But I'm still wondering why you won't use the sprites as hand drawn art together with the stencil shadows

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What do you mean by this? How is the stencil shadow going to interact with a bitmap and contour to it's details? It can't which is why the invisible collision hull must be in place and anyplace the player's shadow can touch much closely match the 2D sections.

Here are a couple of quotes from a very famous adventure game artist/designer working on the adventure game A Vampyre Story. They're using the exact same technique I'm stealing from them. Perhaps, his explanation will be better. There are two of them taken from two different posts:

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So AVS will be in 3d BUT,,,,not the way you think. I am a big fan of the early Disney movies, and one Oscar winning short in particular really influenced me. It was called The Old Mill. http://disney.go.com/vault/archives/movies/oldmill/oldmill.html It was mood film, meaning it didn’t really have plot, but for good reason. It was a test film for a new technique called multiplane camera. So we are going to do is make a virtual multiplane camera using your PC’s 3d card. The backgrounds will be painted in 2d but placed on 3d planes. This will allow us to keep the backgrounds looking 2d and hand painted, but we get to create the illusion of depth and perspective.

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Quote:

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We draw the backgrounds on paper then scan that in and paint the set layers in Photoshop, with each plane on its own separate PSD layer. Then we save the separate layers as TGAs (Targa files) and turn them into textures, along with their alpha channels (transparent matted areas) in Maya, and then UV map the layers on to flat parallel polygons in Maya. Export that file into our engine, test it make sure it works. Then add particle affects and UV scrolling areas. Add the dynamic lights for the sets and 3d Character models. Import a separate set of geometry for the walk boxes, test that out. Then add all the interactive objects like doors and buttons and things like that. We use Maya to build the character meshes, rig them and to animate them. Nothing really exotic in this process. They only thing unusual is that we aren’t building 3d models for use as our sets, just 2d planes.

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Go here: http://www.adventuregamers.com/screenshot.php?id=6823 to see some screens from this game. The bottom 8 are the new ones. All of those screens are broken up into layers (the parallel planes), so it's a 2D game but because of these layers, it will have depth. It's like parallax scrolling in the old 16-bit days, but a bit more advanced in the execution because of the use of a full, realtime engine. This will allow for zooming in/out and moving the camera into the scene or out as necessary. The technique will be more apparent in exterior scenes. Anyway, I will need my shadows to interact with my backgrounds or else it just won't be as convincing an effect.

Uhm, I think you can set these renderstates in a FFP with SMEE2. I will give it a try.

Though - unfortunately - I can't get this "render a panel behind a view if it has a negative layer"-feature with the current A7 beta to work. No one confirmed/denied this yet and I simply made a panel with a large background bitmap and a negative layer (look into the beta forum!). So.. if this doesnt work, well... whatever.

Cu later..

@ OB:

Well, I see your problem and the quote you've copied expains how it can be achieve in theory. The practical side is quite more complex I guess. A plugin like I mentioned could be the answer. Like HeelX suggested, SMEE2 could be a potential solution. I will keep on testing with the shadow mapping shader, if you might need it, just ask. Because of the faqt that you can't integrate any other solution, a shader could be the only option... But this is someting we'll see later on in the future

But to refer to your question:

Quote:

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What do you mean by this? How is the stencil shadow going to interact with a bitmap and contour to it's details? It can't which is why the invisible collision hull must be in place and anyplace the player's shadow can touch much closely match the 2D sections.

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What I ment by this, why not just a simple sprite that represents your art.
Then set the shadow_stencil var to on where as the shadow will interact (contour) with your scene (geometry blocks,sprites, models). Here's a picture where I simple programmed the shadow_stencil veriable in c-script to on and setted the shadow flag and the cast flag in wed for the model. The green sprite hasn't got anything attached qua action or flag:


@ HeelX:

Good luck

Cheers

Frazzle

Actually, the negative layer panel feature won't have anything to do with this. It'll be useful for pure 2.5D games, but my game is still set in a completely 3D world except everything is 2D planes (or sprites) with the real geometry hidden.

The only visible real 3D will be the characters; however I'm even thinking about making them 2D. I'd need to render out a bunch of frames, but it would free up the poly budget. I haven't thought that one through, though because it would take A LOT of frames. I'd need my standard 8 directions for both walking and running, the in-betweens when turning, idles, special case renders for moody, Noirish lighting, the same frames for different camera angles, etc. This would lead to another potential problem.... Can stencil shadows cast from an invisible model? I know they won't work if the model is transparent. I'd want to use a low poly version of the model used for the 2D sprites to cast shadows with. If this is impossible then I guess I'm screwed. I want to focus on this shadow problem first, though.

Why do I have to be so unorhtodox?

@frazzle:

So, can shadows contour to sprites? If I read your explanation correctly, that green area is just a sprite and the stencil shadow is bending up it? I'll try and reread what you wrote and see if I can better interpret it. Regardless, I'd still like the ability for the shadows to render on invisible surfaces just to have it in the engine for any ol' thing I might want it for (or for others who might think of something cool to do with it).

Oke, ask if you have any other question regarding my explanation OB
But your unorthadox way is a way to achieve something quite unique in 3DGS, I'm quite interested in it too Like I mentioned, I'll try to go the shader way but FFP effects require abit of knowledge into assembly programming which isn't easy to get familiar with when never used before.

Cheers

Frazzle

That's all right. I've provided the WME info to jcl in my original request thread from a couple months back. I'm going to see is we can get some kind of new flag in WED that would function as a special kind of invisible/none. Any surface with this flag set to on will be invisible but receive the shadow. Here's that thread:

http://www.coniserver.net/ubbthreads/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/769508/

I'll keep my fingers crossed.

@frazzle and everyone else:

Take a look at this animation short. It's an FLV file, so you'll need a Flash player to view it (I use this free player):

http://www.mediafire.com/?9wxxn2xh4om

Certain parts of this feature showcase the 2D yet still 3D effect I'm talking about. Here's the original Disney short that inspired the creator of A Vampyre Story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMwa3ZwTwyA

It also uses the layered 3Dish effect and was Disney's first foray into that technology. They used it a lot in Snow White and throughout many of their features and shorts ever since. It's nothing revolutionary in the world of animation (anime features Akira and Ghost in the Shel, as well as Batman The Animated Series used it a lot), but you don't see it a lot in 2D or 2.5D games. It's usually more along the lines of your standard parallax scrolling effect seen in side scrollers. A good example of that would be the Limbo trailer. That forest stuff at the beginning feature your run of the mill parallax scrolling; however it's still very similar to what I'm wanting to do:

http://www.limbogame.org

I'll cross my fingers too
The video's show indeed what you're trying to achieve but like you've mentioned it's not shader related so I hope jcl will manage to include this special feature

Cheers

Frazzle