I want to understand more about DBP's shadow shading command.
Quote: "This command requires hardware specifically designed for this feature, as it"s a very intensive calculation. Use this command sparingly for best performance. Shader based shadows cannot be used in combination with animated bone models. You must use CPU based shadow rendering for this. To change the offset to reduce/increase self-shadowing artifact described above, simply copy the stencilshadow.fx from the effects folder of the compiler directory, and paste it into your project folder. Open it up and you can change the shader near the bottom to a value other than 0.1 to choose your own value."
Now I have seen many examples of shadow shading, HLSL shadow mapping, some snippets here and there and in DarkSOURCE; all of which show you have to get shadows drawn. All fine, but with the native command I am least certain about its inner workings.
Where is the shadow drawn? On a high res texture with runtime calculated projectional UV coordinates or something?
What similarities does it have with light mapping? Apart from the obvious, shadows only; less cpu intensive, not baked...
I think I have seen a DarkSOURCE or DarkShader snippet for creating shadows for boned characters (or any animated model). I see that the native shadow shader cannot work with boned characters. I would quite like the players to have shading options in their control panels and will probably try to get some of Evolved's shadow shaders in addition to work with my shaders. However, how viable is it to have a series of character frames baked into seperate models and have the native shadow mapper cast shadows using these seperate low poly models in hidden state?
I am guessing the more polygons, the more intensive the calculation. The idea here is to use the cheaper system in the distance, and the more accurate system near the player.
