I made a screenshot concerning the shadows:

i dont get that prob with the shadows but once again, they are pitch black.. can i increase the brightness or something?

Thanks for the bug reports!

As there seem to be a lot of problems with the shadows, i changed some things (old shadows are still included, this is a new sType):
- Shadowmap gets encoded to a A8R8G8B8 (32bit argb) texture instead of a R32F (32bit floating point) texture. This runs on virtually any GFX Card and is also a little faster.
- Because of the encoding, Variance Shadowmapping can no longer be used, so i added a 3x3 PCF filtering instead. This doesn't look as good a vsm, but it's still nice and also runs on a lot of older hardware (should run on a GeforceFX and Radeon 9000, not tested though).

Here's what i still have to do (for performance optimizations and easier handling):
- Rewrite the global depthmap shader to encode it's map to a A8R8G8B8 texture
- Use that depthmap to draw full scene shadows (sType = 1) instead of rendering the full scene shadows in an additional pass. Will fasten things up a bit and shadows are drawn by deferred shading and not forward rendering. Might be useable for other things as well like ssao.
- Think of a way to get correct lighting when using scene shadows. This won't be perfect, but better than the current way how full scene shadows are added to the scene.

I will release a new snapshot next week so you guys can test the new shadows and see if they work or if you still get bugs.
If they do work, i will think about adding parallel split shadow mapping for better visuals. This will be another sType, so in the end you guys can choose exactly which shadows you want. Fast PCF filtered shadows which will run on a broad range of hardware, parallel split shadows with PCF which will be slower but nicer, variance shadows which will not run on all hardware, parallel split variance shadows which will (hopefully) look superb but will only make sense on high end GPUs.




If you use sType = 0, you can increase the brightness with ambient_red/green/blue.
If you are using sType = 1, you can increase brightness by opening sc_vsmSun.fx in shade-c/fx and changing shadowAlpha. I forgot to include a simple method to change brightness through lite-c. Will include it in the next snapshot






Shadows are parallel projected and then use vsm. As you already said, there is nothing more to it



At the moment you have to use sType = 1 to get shadows on gs-shaders. I'm working on it.



Good rays are indeed blurred a bit, so the shader doesn't have to use that many tabs and it will run on a broader range of hardware. As for the godrays only beeing displayed when looking into the sun: I don't know a method on how to do good looking godrays when not having the sun on screen. As soon as i find a fast solution for this, i will include it



Yes, this is a known bug. I can't do anything about it.



You have to call sc_setup() again after changing the resolution. The DirectX device beeing dead after a few seconds sounds like you are calling sc_setup(), sc_smSunSetup(), sc_lightBeams() every frame in a while loop, which you shouldn't do. Do the examples work for you or do they also crash after a while?


Again, thanks for the feedback and sorry for all the bugs (especially the blocky shadows on some systems)

Update:
sType = 1 shadows don't produce wrong lighting anymore
You can now use every shader you want together with shade-c's shadows and it will most likely look correct

So no need to rewrite all those shaders to support shadowmapping *phew* Also makes things a lot easier for me when implementing point light shadows for dynamic lights in the future *yay*





This was actually easier than i thought ...

I only tried your sample when I wrote the report above.

the shadows jitter alot when moving, any way to correct this?

Hi,

Shade-C is superb and I hope you keep on developing for a while to make everything perfect :-) Kudos to you!



You are using a radial blur starting at the position of the sun, right? Can't you make it work also for positions outside the screen? Then you could calculate the "virtual" sun position somewhere at the screen border and then do the godrays.



I guess he wanted to ask how he could improve the shadow map resolution. To be honest, I didn't recognized how to switch it, too.

Other question: is it the case that the shadow of the foliage of the tree isn't rendered correctly, I mean.. doesn't your shadow mapping support alpha textures?

No, his answer was exactly what I wanted to know



I think it does. The shadow resolution is just very low and thus you can only see it at the shadows edges.

Do you get crashes with all samples or just some of them?



If you are using sType=1 shadows then you can't do anything about the jittering at the moment. I'm working on it.



I hope so too, as there's still a lot of work to do



Yes that's how it's done. I don't know how to get a good virtual sun vector in screen space yet to apply the radial blur center to. If i get that working, the rest is piece of cake (at least that's what i hope )



Alpha maps are supported, but as slin already said: Shadowmap resolution is very low, so you sometimes don't notice it as everything is blurry.

void sc_smSunSetup(var SMMapRes, var SMRes, var SMdepth, float SMblur, var sType)
To give the shadows a sharper look, you can decrease SMRes. The lower it gets, the sharper the shadows are. However there also is a smaller area where shadows are being cast. You can also use a low value for SMdepth, this will also sharpen the shadows, but will decrease the maximal z distance of shadows.

Uhm...a very stupid question.

What the hell are Kudos?