Irrlicht Engine

Two quick questions:

First one: I can't recall the exact technical term for them, but can you increase the 'shadow resolution' without increasing polycount?

Click for image

It's a low quality jpg, but I encircled the part where the edgeness is most obvious. It shadows each triangle seperatly, which leads to the jaggy shadows. Of course you can solve this by making the polycount higher, but that wouldn't be preffered.

Any solution to make this smoother in Irrlicht?

My second question: is there any way to colorise billboards like you can with Draw2dImage()?

For the second question you can set the material of the billboard i think, so you could set the colour that way probably.

For the first question i think you cant improve it without having a higher poly model, but im no expert on shadows!

That looks like a menu system there, couldnt you use a higher poly model there and then in-game you could use the lower poly model where the poorer shadows may not necessarily be so obvious?

Ah, managed to colorise a billboard now, apperantly I was at the right options before, but they don't work when you disable lighting for the billboard (wanted to colorise sprite explosions so wanted them bright).

I suppose I could make higher poly models for the menu only, but that would mean I'd have to model everything twice... :/ The current models you see are just placeholders to see which sides front and up (hence the antennas), so I do intend on making them a bit more complicated.

Still, not a gamebreaking issue ofcourse.

How did you actually colourise the billboard scene node? I used draw2DImage and that lets you do all over colourisation and corner colourisations. Can this be done with the billboards too?

Use the GetMaterial function on the billboard node, then set ambient, specular and/or emmisive colours to change the colour.

is the model mesh in .X format? the shadows are generally smoother than other formats like .3ds...if you are already using .X though...i cant help

I don't know a way to reduce the jagged edges for self shadowing with stencil shadows.
The problem is, that stencil shadows start at the vertex positions, because they are extruded edges. Shadow mapping doesn't have this problem, but self-shadowing is harder with it and irrlicht doesn't support it.

Using .x models, and no stencil shadows.

No stencil shadows? What exactly are you using for shadowing then?

looks like vertex lighting hence the bad resolution on low poly meshes

No way to increase that without increasing polycount then? I know it's technically possible, at least, even in the direct3d driven 3d studio max viewports it's less jaggy, let alone an actual render.

I haven't begun making the character model parts yet (the ones in the screenie are just quick placeholders), so I could make them a bit higher poly, but if it's not necessary I'd like to avoid it, saves on filesize and modelling time. Or I just learn to live with the jaggier shading. :p

you could try smoothing your normals in case that's the problem, if it isn't, you could use a normal map to give the illusion of smothness around the jagged parts, or make a nice shader in rendermonkey and use it as a material

Well the model used is just a quick sphere from 3d studio, so I doubt normals would be the problem, or that a normal map would help in that case.

And making my own shader is probably a little out of the league of a first-time project, but I'll look into it if I get really desperate, thanks :p

Again: What shadow technique are you using, when you say that this is not stencil shadow?

It's definitely a problem of the normals. 3ds meshes do not support smoothing groups, thus normals are not smoothed at face edges.