Original Post
Hey Folks, I know shadows get brought up alot, but I don't wanna do realistic shadows, or anything real fancy. I wan't to simply have a dark circle at the characters feat that deform acording to the geometry they are walking on. Take this screenshot of Zelda 64, and note the area I circled: 
That's basically all the shadows for the game. But as the sun moves around, or as characters move about on various surfaces, the shadow deforms acordingly. I have tried to simulate this on my own project. Note a screenshot from my game: 
I acomplish it thrugh alpha blending and it works fairly well, only thing is, it works well on flat surfaces and with very careful tweaking of draw-orders. Things higher than shadows, for example, are rendered after the shadows are rendered. This causes unwanted effects should, say, a character cross a bridge above another character, the shadows aren't guaranteed to show correctly. Further, if the character climbs a hill, or a stairwell, the shadow remains horizontal, it doesn't deform to the hillside. I don't like this at all. Anyway, I'm damn sure the zelda programmers, and other folks who have done this, are using some sort of stencil buffer effect. Most stencil shadow tutorials concentrate on complex shadow rendering, I simply want a dark spot. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
That's basically all the shadows for the game. But as the sun moves around, or as characters move about on various surfaces, the shadow deforms acordingly. I have tried to simulate this on my own project. Note a screenshot from my game: I acomplish it thrugh alpha blending and it works fairly well, only thing is, it works well on flat surfaces and with very careful tweaking of draw-orders. Things higher than shadows, for example, are rendered after the shadows are rendered. This causes unwanted effects should, say, a character cross a bridge above another character, the shadows aren't guaranteed to show correctly. Further, if the character climbs a hill, or a stairwell, the shadow remains horizontal, it doesn't deform to the hillside. I don't like this at all. Anyway, I'm damn sure the zelda programmers, and other folks who have done this, are using some sort of stencil buffer effect. Most stencil shadow tutorials concentrate on complex shadow rendering, I simply want a dark spot. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
