this built is very cool there are a lot of usefull tolls on that.
take look on the image.
link: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1611
OK, the car’s material was messing with me; I thought that was the effect. Looks pretty good. Nice - soft shadows should be built into the official Blender builds, since it’s seems pretty good-looking. That should be done right next to orthographic shadows (shadows from a spot-lamp that appear sun-like, uniform in direction).
the official release dont have this feature unfortunably, I just used a spot light buffering shadows, there is an exclent option that works on the new game engines releases that is the possibility of use the clip start and clip end options, that allows you to use the spot lights as a sun for certain scenes, it s not 100% accurate but its mutch better than the previrous spot from 2.49b.
How would clip start and end help you to simulate a sun lamp? Aren’t those features already in the BGE?
For shadows as if they seem to come from a sun and the ability to shadow a large-scale scene, wouldn’t it be better to just code shadow functionality for the sunlamp itself, I believe the new version of the NeoAxis engine for example uses parallel-split shadow maps for this.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_ch10.html
@Ace - I tried to work on implementing orthographic shadows for the sun-type effect; it seemed like an easy, ‘hack-together’ kind of fix, but I couldn’t get it work. It should have been as simple as setting the temporary camera for the That parallel-split method seems much more complex (though it would probably look better); I don’t think any average developer could piece it together - I’m pretty sure a real developer would have to implement that.
It not works like a sun, but is the closest feature so far, and on the previrous versions of blender that function wasnt used on the game engine, so if you change it on the 2.49 for example nothing happen.
@leonn - But how exactly would you use the clipping to help simulate a sun lamp? Could you show an example of what it does or looks like?
I wonder why it can’t just be done where we can control the start-size of the spot-cone when it comes to percentage of the size of the end of the cone. Then we can have a parallel lamp and the orphographic shadows won’t look near as hackish.
Maybe even have a spotlamp type that resembles a parallelagram and have a tiled shadowbuffer array that use lower resolutions in areas far from the camera.
This would mean expanding the spotlamp functionality a bit in general and finding a way to render specular highlights from such a lamp, but if it’s not a good idea to expand it to the rendering side of Blender then it could be hidden when the renderer is set to “Blender Render”
Take a look on the images, look at the size of the city, if I havent use the clip start and end on the spot light parameters i couldnt have this results with this size of model. as I said inst is a sun, but is something.
Take a look and say what you guys think.
OK, I see. That does look really nice. To my eyes, you clipped the shadows so they don’t touch the ground? Where’s the clip start parameter, and where’s the clip end parameter exactly?
its on the spot lights parameters, take a look there that you ll find
Not where in Blender, but where in your screenshot? By the way, I couldn’t get the shadows to be soft. Is there a button or something like that?
HEy joeman, you ll need to download the built version that I had posted.
Then just put a spot light on the scene. To have the buffering of the shadow, you ll need to turn the buf shadow to on, then for a soft shadow you ll have to increase the samples of this lamp, there are other things on the light parameters that change it softness.
You ll need a graphic card that can handle soft shadows and you ll need to use GLSL.
I see - my card can handle GLSL, but changing the samples didn’t do anything for me. Bah, well. I can get by fine with my normal buffered shadows. Still should be built into the official Blender build.
Maybe is your graphic card, maybe is an ATI model and the code is made for nvidias, or something like that, I hope that this soft lamp be part of the final built, this is soft ad alpha shadows, so if blender foundation doesnt use a code that is allready done and people implemented on the BGE i think that the blender foundation doesnt want that the BGE to be competitive with other game engines.
Well I dont know, probably I dont understand the scripting very well.