Comments on: Small pre-pre-beta shadow mapping lirary

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 01:57:56 +0000

Hi Catalin,

Nice work. There are a couple of things I was hoping you could help me understand.

1. What’s the purpose of the “RenderShadows” function and the MatTexture?

It looks like this solution draws each model 3 times. Once in RenderShadowMap, once in RenderShadows, and once to truely render the model.

I understand that RenderShadowMap draws each object in order to create the shadow, but I’m not sure what the “RenderShadows” function does.

2. In my world, 1 XNA unit = 1 meter. As the scale of the model becomes smaller, the the detail of the shadow becomes much worse. I’m assuming that it’s because we’re using less area of the shadow map. So, I reduced the orthographicSize to 10 and that helps. However, the self shadowing on the models doesn’t look right. (Just shrink the model to 1/10th the size and you’ll see what I mean).

Can you help me understand the relationship between the size of the model, the shadow map, and the rendered shadow itself?

Thanks for your time and great work!!

By: Catalin Zima

Catalin Zima — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:18:03 +0000

unfortunately no

By: ktg

ktg — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:11:31 +0000

Any progress using thiswith skinned messhed?

By: Robert

Robert — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 15:22:30 +0000

Awesome work, I surely have learned a lot from your lib, thank you and keep it up!

By: Lima

Lima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:41:01 +0000

Hum… That could explain the problems I’m having.
But there must be another way to do shadow maps without the Single surface format. I’ll investigate this. thx

By: Catalin Zima

Catalin Zima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:37:49 +0000

You could try and use Color, but the precision will be very low, and the results will not look too good.

By: Lima

Lima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:35:50 +0000

Catalin, unfortunately my video card does not support the Single Surface Format (24 bits red channel if I’m not mistaken).
Is there any alternative format I can use?

By: Lima

Lima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 12:33:23 +0000

Sorry. You’re right. I unzipped the file to my projects root directory and the project got lost in the middle of the other projects. Usually zip files have a root folder with subfolders.

By: Catalin Zima

Catalin Zima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:10:29 +0000

There’s nothing missing. The library is provided as a XNA Game Library Project (the ShadowMapRenderer project), with the source code included.

By: Lima

Lima — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:07:07 +0000

Hi, I’ve downloaded the sample, but the assembly library seems to be missing. The project references the file ShadowMapRender.dll which does not exist.
I’m having some trouble with shadow maps, and maybe you could help me. Do you have any contact email I can use? Thanks.