Hi, I’m just wondering if anything has been implemented in Blender since Yo Frankie to allow for realtime shadows to come from ‘sun’ type lights? I have currently been using miltiple spot lights across a given area to simulate the effect, which is obviously very costly to framrates.
Since we already have realtime shadows implemented for the spotlights, would it really be that much of a leap to get it for sunlights too?
There’s currently no way to implement sun-type shadows, though some people just make one large shadow lamp that follows around the camera, which works fine. Sun-type shadows would be a very nice addition, though.
Applying the same shadow-mapping used for spot lights to sun lamps would probably be pretty simple, but they’d look horrible without doing something like cascaded shadow maps. That’s not to say that the current spot lamps look all that great…
Yeah, I’d think that a quick and dirty solution would be to just add an ‘Orthogonal’ button to the Spot Lamp dialog. This would make shadows appear more flat, like sun shadows.
EDIT: I mean, to add a function to orthogonalize the camera that’s displaying the spot lamp shadows. I tried, but I couldn’t find where the camera would actually render the scene (and I couldn’t build the source, either - I guess it was broken when I got it).
@SolarLune
If you ever need some help with BGE source code, I’m usually sitting around in the #blendercoders IRC channel on Freenode.