So I’m working on making maps for a video game in blender, in the style of Deus Ex/FEAR. I have the room finished with some light models up and the place is textured. The textures are good and the object shadows are good but the shadow buffers are all wrong because I can only get them to work for spot lights. I was thinking of backing ray shadows into the textures and although that works when the player comes into play it messes everything up. You see the player standing behind a piller in compleat darkness but the player reacts to the light behind the pillor as if the piller is not even there.
My thought is that maybe there is a way to cast shadow buffers on some objects but not others from light sources that are set up to do so? It all depends on how taxing shadow buffers are on the renderer, but if it could be done shadow buffers could be calculated on only moveing objects and static objects could have backed shadows. However if shadow buffers are not that taxing I don’t see why every light can’t have a shadow buffer. I would guess because lots of games have flash lights that all shadows are shodow buffers in modern day games but I don’t know.
Also is there a way to make a backed shadow mask? This would be cool if I could do this although it would be pointless if every shadow uses shadow buffers. Still if there was a way to turn ever backed shadow into a mask then have the underlying texture be whatever you wonted I would only need to back the shadows once for each object. Still I would need to find out a way to make the mask fade when the player turns on there flash light if this could be acompleshed a next gen game made in blender would not be a unreal possabliaty.
These may be more of ideas for the devlopers for inhancing the game engin and blenders realtime funcanality but I’m hopeing this can be done so that games can look at lest as good as something like FEAR.
