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Torque 3D can do it


Chelaru

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torque 3d is to me anyway the best open source engine you can get your hands on. even without the lovely visuals, the only thing atm thats letting it down for me is the shadows. but i know thats my problem, not setting certain details right to suit the scenes

 

I'm curious, but whats your specific complaint about the shadows? Is it the noisy blur effect?

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I think is because soft shadows don't work .


The first time i tried it i was expecting this : http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/docs/shadow_PCSS.pdf not this : http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch10.html .



A big issue is the light in t3d. It has some good light. But no good tutorial on how to use it. All the demos have bad light and bad shadows.


The only demo that has some nice light setup is RiftValley .

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torque 3d is to me anyway the best open source engine you can get your hands on. even without the lovely visuals, the only thing atm thats letting it down for me is the shadows. but i know thats my problem, not setting certain details right to suit the scenes

 


At the part with the best open source engine you are correct. But we need some good tutorials for the art department. Most of us are coming from engineering areas, and the code side we are good on tutorials but on the art side we need better tutorials.

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I'm curious, but whats your specific complaint about the shadows? Is it the noisy blur effect?

 

It is the noisy blur effect yea i kept thinking it was something to do with the pre-taps and things like that increasing it never helped. But also its the performance hit of the shadows too. But i do think this is all my fault for not getting great looking shadows cos ive seen some of the work by other people in here and they look amazing

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I'm curious, but whats your specific complaint about the shadows? Is it the noisy blur effect?

 

It is the noisy blur effect yea i kept thinking it was something to do with the pre-taps and things like that increasing it never helped. But also its the performance hit of the shadows too. But i do think this is all my fault for not getting great looking shadows cos ive seen some of the work by other people in here and they look amazing

 

Yeah. I'm not fond of the default settings, honestly. I've been iterating on that to try and find a better default config.


One setup I've found that works fairly well is to set the shadow distance to 70-100, rather than the default 200 or 250, if i remember it right.


That makes it so the shadow maps are stretched over a smaller area, improving the sharpness. 70 is still a decent ways out so it doesn't feel super weird to see stuff unshadowed. Also, because you're trying to shadow a smaller compartive area, you can lower the number of slips from 4 to 3. This requires the shadows to do fewer passes, which can help performance.


Give that a go and lemme know if that helps. I do want to replace the current softness method(as it's based off the now-old Crysis 1 method), but what's there is workable for the short term, just gotta fiddle with the settings.

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tried those settings with 4 splits at 3000 1500 750 375, it looks really good up to 70 units after that the noise is really spread out, it definitely does look better the closer the shadow the noise is still there but really scaled down which does look a lot better.


I do think though a new method needs to be implemented PCSS is good. I might give it a shot at implementing it

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tried those settings with 4 splits at 3000 1500 750 375, it looks really good up to 70 units after that the noise is really spread out, it definitely does look better the closer the shadow the noise is still there but really scaled down which does look a lot better.


I do think though a new method needs to be implemented PCSS is good. I might give it a shot at implementing it

 

Yeah, go for it and let us know how it fares!


Pretty positive the reason the Crysis1 method was picked at the time back in the day was because it gave reasonable results for minimal performance hit, whereas at the time stuff like PCF and the like were considered too expensive to be practical. It's still kinda expensive, but not to the point where it's unfeasible. So I'm definitely curious to see how your experiments go. If we can get nicer looking shadows with performance nosediving, I'd be 100% behind that. :)

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Got the engine to use a 32bit texture for the depth stencil, step one complete lol needed to remove code from the d3ddevice to do this cos it was using automatic depth stenciling, and when i tried to change it to D3DFMT_R32F i kept getting a crash - please ensure u have direct x installed etc etc so i may be implementing this wrong but we will find out after i get the shaders sorted


http://i.imgur.com/muwF8x8.jpg

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