Shadows

[DarkDepths]

I have asked in the past why shadows are so slow, how it can be worked around, what I would like to know now, is if there is any way to speed up the shadows drawn from the stencil buffer? It would be really great to finally be able to have shadows!

[TheC]

You could use a shader, and use shadow mapping, instead of a volume. I've never done it, but i've been le(a)d to beleive its much faster. The downside is that you'll lose support for old machines.

[funcdoobiest]

I guess you may have considered this option but I have been thinking about using a simplfifed mesh and using that to add the shadow volume to as the speed the shadows are genrated is dependent on the number of vertices in your mesh. I think you could probably get away with a considerablt lower poly 'shadow mesh', obvioulsy its a work-around, it would also be nice to speed up the actual shadowing techniques themselves.

I am assuming someone here has proabaly tried this already, I am guessing this will require making some changes to the engine as you would need to be able to generate shadows from nodes that were not visible (i haven't looked but I imagine this will be trivial). Obviously for animated meshes it would require that you also had an animated simplified mesh but I think the additional cost here would easily be outweighed by the savings.