Wow, thanks for the kind words guys! Much appreciated



There's only one thing that i can think of at the moment that is making the shadows unusable for outdoor scenes: The sky gets rendered black. I don't think it's too hard to fix that (hopefully ^^).
Apart from that the current depthmap gets rendered to a fp16 texture instead of plain old 32bit. The whole thing works with 32bit if really needed, but you get some nasty artifacts on the smooth shadow areas sometimes. This is a known "bug" with variance shadowmapping. I'm thinking of creating a simple fallback without variance shadowmapping for 32bit so the whole thing can be used on a wider range of hardware.
Everything else is working just fine and i hope it stays that way




Unfortunally, no there isn't. At least i haven't found one. But to get you started, here's some code:

vertex shader:
//cube-projection
output.position_world = mul(position, matWorld).xyz;
output.LightDir = (vecLightPos[0].xyz - output.position_world);

pixelshader:
depthmap = texCUBE(depthSampler, -float4(input.LightDir.xyz, 1.0f));

Basically you just have to take a shadowmapping shader of your choice and put these 3 lines in. The good thing about all this is that you don't need special light matrices for your projection anymore and can use matEffect1-8 for other things


Now back to optimizing that shader...