Basic shadows efficiency question

Hi,

I wouldn't say that the complexity of the receiver have no impact at all.. You still need to render receivers at least twice (assuming 1 light, you need a Z pass, then the lighting pass using the stencil mask). But then, this is usually not as bad for performance and fillrate as the edge/silhouette detection, shadow volume extrusion and rendering of the casters.

For shadow mapping, I'm not 100% sure, but I think the bottlenecks will be the render target changes, and the number of times you sample the shadow map if you want soft shadows.

of course using more polygon models is gonna run slower in both methods,
shadowmaps scale better then stencil shadows for higher polygon models WRT creating the shadows in the first place. ie stencil shadows require a lot more work per vertex

Thanks for the replies guys!

Hmm, I need to render the receivers twice? I think I see what you're talking about, using your method it would be more accurate because then instead of lighting areas without any shadow and then darkening them, you simply don't light areas which are in shadow.

I'm not too worried about perfect accuracy though, so I think I can get away with only rendering the receiver once, right? Here's what I'm doing, below.

// visible pass
1. Render the entire scene normally (receivers, occluders, everything)

// shadow pass
1. Enable stencil buffer, disable Z write and color buffer
2. Render front faces of extruded shadow volumes (+ increment stencil buffer)
3. Render back faces of extruded shadow volumes (+ decrement stencil buffer)
4. Render black quad covering the entire scene (pass stencil test for >= 1)

Thanks a lot!

roos

Thanks very much Anonymous Poster for your great explanation :) I understand now.

For now I'll implement it the "hack" way, then later if it turns out there's still frames to burn after all the pixel shaders and effects have chewed up time, then I'll upgrade to the more correct version :)

Btw, I read about this technique from "Real time rendering tricks and techniques in DirectX" (book in the Prima press series). It's actually a good book at least at an introductory level, and the author did mention the technique was incorrect since you're lighting and then darkening.

roos

Quote:

Original post by roos Hi, I'm working on implementing stencil shadows for my game... Anyways, it seems to me that stencil shadows only depend on the complexity of the shadow-casting object... So, if the receiver has a crapload of polys, or if the receiver is just a simple plane, you'll get the same results either way, right? I was wondering, does shadow mapping have this same benefit? I haven't heard it mentioned anywhere, but logically I'd imagine that shadow mapping would depend on the complexity of the receiver... Thanks, roos

Depends what you mean by complexity. Stencil shadow systems are very difficult to make performent due to pathelogical load problems due to fillrate. Imagine a fence grating trying to cast a shadow - it can overdraw every pixel on the screen dozens of times. It also increases complexity for more advanced lighting and filtering due to its preference to deferred rendering.

Most of the software complexity involved in a stencil shadow system relies on determing wether an occluder is already enclosed in a shadow volume, so that it doesn't have to be drawn. This can get fairly complicated, and it still doesn't cap the max complexity of any given seen. Many people have had to pull stencil shadow systems late in the game cycle becuae they just don't perform well enough.

Shadow maps, on the other hand, are always a bounded by a linear time. In fact, most Offline rendering just uses huge shadow maps (and uses hacks when there are noticable artifacts). Projected shadows are even cheaper and pretty convincing (e.g. Half-Life 2).

Hey thanks for the info EvilDecl81...

Man, tbh it seems the more I learn about shadows, the more confusing it gets :) I implemented stencil shadows a couple of days, really naively, and now it turns out it doesn't work on meshes which aren't closed (bummer). So I'm thinking of implementing shadow mapping, though that also seems like quite a can of worms. Lots of texture memory, lots of computations for omnidirectional lights, and horrible aliasing effects if the camera is too close.

So... right now I can either upgrade my stencil shadows code to a better algorithm which handles open or closed meshes, or scrap it and do shadow mapping instead. Right now my stencil shadow code is fairly fast because it does all the work on the GPU- ideally there would be some algorithm that handles non-closed meshes that also utilizes the GPU...

I'm pretty lost right now, I think I'll just start coding shadow mapping for now- even if I can't get it working well, then at least then to say that I learned a new technique. But at some point I do have to commit to some method so that I can get on with my project :) So, if anyone has some recommendation for which route would be the better choice in terms of efficiency and ease of implementation, I would *really* be grateful.

Thanks very much,
roos

Here's a summary of links to shadowing articles that may save you some googling time:
http://www.rasterise.com/links.html