Shadow algorithms recommendation

What kind of content do you have in the scene?

If it was mostly static such as buildings and trees etc. then lightmaps would work fine and be fast seeing as they are precomputed.

If you are not looking for realistic shadows than just dropped blob shadows would be a fast way of doing them, although this may be taking the 'low end' requirement a bit too far.

Anyway, in terms of high quality dynamic shadows stencil shadows and shadow maps are the most widely used and generally recommendable form of shadows.

Still, it all depends on what's in the scene, what it's doing and how much quality you want.

There isn't really a "correct" solution for this, just a toolbox of different solutions. What is right for you depends on your scenario.

Now, first off decent shadows don't come cheap, so implementing these on a low-end computer is anything but trivial, if you expect a healthy framerate.

If you want self-shadowing, projective shadows are out, and we're talking about either a type of shadow map, or stencils, but stencils generally plough through fillrate, so in reality you're probably looking at shadow maps.

Standard shadow maps suffer significant resolution problems, but if you can live with these, they're both fast & easy to implement. To solve the resolution problems, however, you either need a perspective method (trapezoidal or perspective shadow maps), or cascaded shadow maps.

Both perspective and trapezoidal shadow maps suffer their set of problems, but you can engineer your way around them. I do warn you, however, wrapping your head around the perspective equations can be tricky - the maths are a lot more complicated than standard shadow maps. The main problem area is debugging the results, I advise you to spend a substantial amount of time on your debugging tools in this area to visualize the shadows.

Cascaded shadow maps, however, are basically standard shadow maps, just with the frustum pyramid split into sections. It will generally be slightly more expensive, as there will be some overlap in the shadow casting, and you dynamically have to stitch the texturemaps together, which might also create some seams. But it is easy to implement, and easy to wrap your head around.

Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Quote:

Original post by Twincamtinman What kind of content do you have in the scene?

The scene will consist of a lot of non moving dynamic objects, if that makes any sense. They need to be able to move, but most of them won't be going anywhere soon. I don't want to run a light mapper. This isn't really a 'game' I'm working on (so why am I posting on gamedev?! This didn't occur to me until after I made the OP [smile]). Thanks for the tips though.

I've implimented shadow maps a number of times before, and I don't have any problems with projective geometry. I guess what I'm really looking for is flexability over quality. I don't have infinite time to work on this, so I can't just impliment five different methods depending on the hardware I'm on. I'd rather have maybe two or one that are scalable somehow.

For high-speed & low-end, I was thinking about projected texture blobs. I'd miss out on the self shadowing (I can yell at the user to upgrade their hardware), but I don't know how I'd estimate the the blob size based off arbitrary geometry.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

[Edited by - stanlo on March 3, 2007 4:23:08 AM]

If you have bounding volumes for your objects then it's pretty easy...AABB is the simplest, and I have some very fast code for finding a minimum-volume bounding sphere if you need it.