Real time shadows not working

Hi all. I’m using blender in my ubuntu 16.10 64bit on a HP630 with intel card. I dont know why but for some obscure reason I can’t use shadows in game engine anymore since some months…the only hard mod I’ve made to my system was to install the intel linux graphic drivers…so today i’ve tried reverting the system to default intel graphic driver from ubuntu. But still no shadows…when I disable shadows in the lamp the material looks well lit…with bump maps also…but when i turn shadows on everything looks shadowed…even the parts that shouldn’t…I also tried to reload all my blend files which i made using shadows and which i know they where working fine, but not anymore…if someone could help I’d really apreciate…

realtime shadows have been broken in vanilla since 2.77. the UPBGE has fixed this issue.

another possibility could be your setup is wrong. try turning on the shadow debug, it will show a box where the shadows are rendered. the size (resolution) shouldnt be higher then 2048. bigger graphics cards can use 4096, anything higher is just bad.

only a few lights in the scene can have shadows, i recommend no more then 4, but only 1 for low end hardware.

Thank you Daedalus for your exhaustive answer…also I didn’t know about UPBGE…I will try it!!

a few odd tricks to have high res shadow is to scale your world down below 0.01, you have to map the scale to the physics engine as well

the reason behind this scaling is when your world is small, you can fit it inside very low frustum size(eg 10), at that size your shadow will still look great even at only 128 or 256

isnt it just as easy to change the frustrum size? accuracy starts to become an issue down that small as well.

its much more preferable to parent your sun to an empty, offset the sun along the Z high enough to fit the scene, then rotate the empty for the sun angle. use a simple python script to copy world position of the active camera to the empty world position. now a smaller frustrum follows the camera.

Hi, I don’t know for intel shadows issue, but realtime shadows work fine on my pc: http://pasteall.org/blend/index.php?id=45512 in blender 2.78a and b just downloaded from blender.org.
The technique used is to parent the sun to the cube using “make vertex parent”. The sun position changes, but not its orientation. https://docs.blender.org/manual/fr/dev/editors/3dview/object/properties/relations/parents.html (select the sun-> shift+select the cube -> tab to go in edit mode -> select one vertex -> ctrl+P ->make vertex parent)

This technique to parent the sun is really interesting if only I could see the result… : ) I think I messed my system in some way. Anyway…if you create a big world the far objects will look unshadowed…maybe a trick to add a bit of fog…

until the bge gets shadow cascades, we are just going to have to deal with no distant shadows.

the reason one would use python over a vertex parent would be in the case that the camera swithes, then sun shadows would snap to the new camera.

Give a notice to the devs to finish the shadow branch if you want the shadow cascades. Link to branch -> https://github.com/UPBGE/blender/tree/ge_shadow_penumbra

Update: today I’ve boot in to windows and started blender, shadows are working fine there…i’m pretty sure that they were working on linux aswell until I tweaked the system, in particular I’ve installed intel 01 linux graphic drivers as said before…and maybe other tweaks but I don’t remember exactly…then reverted back to default ubuntu intel drivers but still no shadows. So…it is a system driver problem here. The reason I tried to tweak system drivers was that I was unaware that my graphic card can operate till opengl 2.1 but no further versions.