Shadows under feet

pippy3 · Post by **pippy3** » Sun Feb 20, 2011 8:39 am

I've decided to do a basic blob under the player / other objects. What's the best approach to doing this?

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Sun Feb 20, 2011 3:32 pm

Calculate the position of the ground relative to the object you want to put your blob shadow, and put the blob shadow there.

pippy3 · Post by **pippy3** » Sun Feb 20, 2011 11:19 pm

Mel wrote:Calculate the position of the ground relative to the object you want to put your blob shadow, and put the blob shadow there.

haha yes.

I was looking for more something like this

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... 5ec2e6eb06

or

http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=22261

Obviously the shadow can't be a mesh. Or a billboard. It will have to be a texture on a material on another layer of a mesh.

I have no idea where to begin, real world vectors into texture cords seems very hard to do.

vitek's solution looks like it puts builds a shadow from a texture and asks the driver to render it on top of everything else.

pippy3 · Post by **pippy3** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 9:12 am

I'm just going to scrap the shadow feature in my game. Sometimes unity3d looks very tempting.

Stensil buffers create too many artifacts.

Xeffects only works on limited hardware.

Even simple textures for shadows only works with meshes, which will create artifacts.

I remember reading in the API a way to do this, but they've taken out this feature.

REDDemon · Post by **REDDemon** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 12:26 pm

the simplest solution is to darken terrain vertices under the player. that's not very realistic but easy and fast to apply. you need to update few vertices and if the terrain is not a big mesh but a tiled terrain the speed of updating is great.

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Mon Feb 21, 2011 10:08 pm

blob shadows are extra meshes, the only way to create such an effect as you comment us to use projectors, something Irrlicht lacks for the time being.

Sometimes, simply there aren't easy solutions.

pippy3 · Post by **pippy3** » Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:24 am

REDDemon wrote:the simplest solution is to darken terrain vertices under the player. that's not very realistic but easy and fast to apply. you need to update few vertices and if the terrain is not a big mesh but a tiled terrain the speed of updating is great.

My first reaction too. Sadly the meshes under the player are larger than the shadow - thusly won't work that great. Also the objects under the player are using a material type that doesn't have shadow cords.

Thanks for that Mel - sometimes it's best knowing it's not worth it before you set off. I could have wasted many hours trying to get it to work.