High-detail terrain shadows
The shadow rendering is now much more optimized, and has no limit on resolution! Here is a screenshot of the same terrain as before at a higher detail level. Since all of the lighting is pre-computed in the texture, the increase in quality has no affect on the framerate!
Will it be possible to play the game with real-time shadows as well? As far as I can tell from the screen shot, this is a static shadow-map + PCF + blur, which can be easily done in real time and optimized with the Cascading Shadow Maps technique, used in Crysis and outlined in nVIDIA’s OpenGl SDK 10.
Not to talk down to static shadows, as they can often provide higher-quality, better looking shadows for static objects, as shown above, but they usually don’t blend well with character shadows, which will probably be generated by stencil shadow-volumes. Different settings for different generations of hardware, it’s been done before.
Full-scene dynamic shadows are really cool, and I would love to add cascading shadow maps if we have time!
0_0! Thats Really well done.
[...] focusing mainly on the Phoenix Engine’s realistic terrain system (http://blog.wolfire.com/2008/11/high-detail-terrain-shadows/), Wolfire lead programmer David Rosen has still found time to lay the foundation for [...]
This looks very, very impressive. David, will there still be an option to keep the shadows static for us with the bad computers?
[...] post en date, le rendu des terrains, aussi bien l’ éclairage, les ombres, les textures réalistes mais aussi l’ animation procédurale dont le travail, de longue haleine, vient de [...]