From time to time we will inform the community of certain areas of Skyline Development. If we have decided to add a new features or new demos in development etc we will try to make a post in this topic.Feel free to leave your comments to help encourage out development team ; )

v2 - Upgraded Shadows

v2 - Upgraded Shadows

Postby SolarPortal » 11 Jun 2020, 13:34

Ever noticed that objects that self shadowed had horrible lighting conditions from behind, well we did and it looked aweful.
Spent a few days trying to improve shadows and have used a technique called normal offset shadows that improves quality by magnitudes in either front or back face culling. The techinique basically offsets the shadow position sampiing by the normal of the object to essentially create a cage.

This does several things:
* It reduces acne to very minutte levels
* It gives the ability to remove the depth bias approach to shadowmapping reducing an artefact known as peter panning which in simple terms basically shifts the shadow away from an object creating light bleed or the effect that the object is floating.
You see this the most inside buildings where you get a white line down the seams.
* It doesnt add any performance cost really to use the technique
* Gives better quality in both front and back face culling.

For examples:
Here is what you get at the moment with the shadows

Image

What you get with the new render:

Image

Indoor lighting where a directional is casting shadows on the room and a point light is placed in the darkness.
No light bleed or artefacts apart from the depth bias from point lights(wip):
Image

Still working on shadows to make sure we get the best quality possible.
Oh this is also running on the new engine with the upgraded renderer. Lots of work still to do to get the engine usable again but its successfully using GPU based textures and streaming from storage to VRAM.

Also we have extra PCF taps on the shadow for 5x5 and 6x6 which produce even softer shadows.
Too much blurring though and artefacts can start appearing again.
Skyline Game Engine - Lead Dev.
Please provide as much info as possible when asking for help.


Specs: OS: Win 10 64bit, CPU: Intel i7 4770 3.4ghz x 4 core(8 threads), GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, Ram: 16gig DDR3, Windows on 250gb Samsung Evo 860

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Re: v2 - Upgraded Shadows

Postby monkeyfrogstudio » 11 Jun 2020, 15:46

Nice to see this post (and the one on lighting) as lighting/shadows are incredibly important to creating amazing scenes (levels and objects) in a 3D game. You can spend all day making the most awesome textures/materials possible, but if the game engine does not do lighting and shadows well, you might as well toss those textures/materials out the window!

Nice work! Thanks for sharing!
Intel i9-10900K 5.10GHz, 64 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3090 ti 24GB, Windows 11 64-bit, dual monitor display
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Re: v2 - Upgraded Shadows

Postby SolarPortal » 13 Jun 2020, 14:48

Shadow upgrade now seems complete with fully working non artefacted direcitonal light shadows with zero light bleed and ful self shadowing.
Even tree leaves are shadowing and no longer have artefacts on the leaves facing the light.
and the rock from images above looks so much better!

10 years of bad shadows in skyline and we finally have it working!
Skyline Game Engine - Lead Dev.
Please provide as much info as possible when asking for help.


Specs: OS: Win 10 64bit, CPU: Intel i7 4770 3.4ghz x 4 core(8 threads), GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB, Ram: 16gig DDR3, Windows on 250gb Samsung Evo 860

Twitter: @SolarPortal
Instagram: @SolarPortal
User avatar
SolarPortal
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Posts: 3631
Joined: 29 Jul 2012, 15:56
Location: UK
Skill: 3D Modeller
Skill: 2D Artist
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Skill: Level Designer


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