Wow, very impressive! Can I try this out?

This is very beautiful. Do you have any plans for a demo [ with source perhaps]

I hate to point this out on an otherwise very nice IOTD, but isn't the shadow of the column on the right hand side facing the wrong direction (ie towards the dynamic light), with a distinct lack of one on the other side to suggest that there's a static light somewhere behind it to explain the effect?

Gratz n a very nice shot though.

Right. I wouldn't have noticed that, but it really looks wrong. Anyway, a nice IOTD.

good eye... it might just be the ground texture though... notice how if you look hard enough can make out a '?' of darkness in the floor.... obviously a ? would not be the result of an error in his calculations(hopefully not), but more likely just the fact that the texture is darker in that area... so, hopefully that is what it is...

dunno, i could be talking crap though...

Nice work!
A little comment though: aren't the shadows of the columns in the lower left corner supposed to be just darker than the rest of the texture, and not colored?

Question mark?? I've gone crosseyed looking at it, but I can't spot one. (I can see one when I'm looking at it crosseyed, but that's about as good as suggesting that the cloud that went by my window was really a camel). Seriously though, I think you're just seeing a darker patch in the texture.

With the coloured shadow in the bottom left picture, it may be that a blue light is in a different position, closer than the the pillars so that there's still a shadow, but it's slightly blue tinted. If you look at the blue light on the front of the steps and on the pillars themselves, I'd strongly suspect that this is the case - especially because if you look VERY carefully, you can see parts of the picture where the pillars are cutting out a tiny bit of blue light onto the green and red light. I don't see anything to suggest there's anything really wierd going on there, but there's definately something odd in those top two screens.

if you look at the lower right image (the lightmapping only one),
you see that the shadow seems to be there too, i.e. it comes from the lightmap, not from a light.

an interesting visual artifact nonetheless :)

I don't knwo about the direction of the shadows, but I think there's a shadow of Sherlock Holmes in the far right / top picture. See if you can find it. It's the one that looks like an &.

Happy hunting,
Greg

Finally something excellent that isn't a landscape :)


Good work...I'm pretty damn impressed, and after watching pure FF9 video's my standards got high. :)

Beatiful.
Soo....will it be the next quake, or what ? :-)
~V'lion

Well I gotta say, it looks more eyecandish than Doom3 :)

Well... what an interesting thing I noticed in the picture. I see $ sign of the floor. It's partially hidden in the shadows so you need to look at the pic extremely carefully and extremely long time to clearly see it.

Here's where I thought I saw a ? mark....
Look at the top right image....

Well, first thanks for all the nice feedback. I might aswell answer some posts

Nexus: As fabian said, the shadow comes from the static lightmaps. The radius of the light isn't very large so the shadow isn't fully illuminated. Generally to see wich shadows are dynamic look for sharp edges. And yes, the colored image has one green light behind the left column, one red light behind the right and one blue placed more or less between them.

Lucid: Never saw that myself :). I think the questionmark simply comes from rescaleing the image in photoshop, original resolution was 1280x960

Can't say anything certain about a demo. I'll see what i can do

Now I really see it..
I can assure you that nobody wanted to encrypt ? mark this way. I can see also P letter which partially consists from ? There are guite enough darker spots(maybe shadows) which can be grouped together in many ways.
And I see that those shadows aren't fully correct, as one of them facing into opposite direction than it should. SO I simply can't believe in correctness of whole picture.

Hi Jon,

I've been working on similar problems with stencil buffer shadows. I have a paper coming (maybe to flipcode) on the topic, but here are some notes about my experiences:

Yes, you need the near clipping plane *really* close (the alternatives are too horrible to mention). If you also move in the far clipping plane (mine is at 50 meters), this doesn't trash the z0-buffer too badly.

It is possible to determine shadow volumes very fast, especially for static geometry, since you only have to look at object edges, not triangle edges. Using clever silhouette finding algorithms, I got exact shadow volume determination down to one dot product per face and one compare per (object) edge.

When trying to determine if the camera is in a shadow volume, plucker coordinates and bounding volumes are your friends.

For one light, you can save a whole rendering pass by subtracting light from shadowed areas with a black polygon instead of adding light with subsequent passes. I think you can do the same for multiple, colored lights by alpha blending against the inverse of the light color (the order of light sources will affect the result, however, so this is questionable). If you know how to get a subtractive alpha blending, that's really what you want.

-m

Magnificant! I am wondering if there is Source Code for this?