DeleD Community Edition

[hpesoj]

I have been wondering about this for a while, because with DeleD you cannot generate double shadows when lightmapping and I thought it may just be a limitation of the lightmapping process, but having seen DBPro's new lightmapping commands (not the ideal implimentation of lightmapping), which do exhibit double shadows, I am wondering how hard it would be to allow DeleD to do this. Double shadows do add something to the overall realism of a scene. Check here for some screenshots.

Let me demonstrate. In the screenshot below there are two lights of the same settings, at different angles but identical distance from a pillar. Only one small triangular shadow is cast in the centre. This is not really how it would work in real life.



The two screenshots below show either light being switched off. Each casts a separate shadow.



Now below on the left is a mock up of how I think it should look, by combining the images in photoshop. I think it looks a lot cooler . You can get similar shadows if you use two primary coloured lights (below right), so the effect is sort of achievable, but the problem is when you use two lights with the same colours in, the amounts of colour doesn't seem to add, the brighter light just seems to overwrite the other light completely.

It would be quite awesome if you could impliment this in DeleD!

[Paul-Jan]

Thanks for this very detailed request. Other users (like Vampyre) have pointed this out as well. We'll give the light blending another good look when we revamp the lightmapper. Perhaps even sooner.

[Jeroen]

I think this might be a good feature to concentrate on after the 1.5 release. It'll really spice up our lightmapper.

[jwatte]

I believe that the current lightmapper just has a "is in shadow" flag for each texel. However, the right way to do lighting is to start out with darkness (or, rather, ambient), and then, for each texel, for each light, check whether it's in shadow from that light, and if not, add that lights' contribution.

If, instead, your mapper maps lights into the scene, you can still do the beam tree from each light, and add light contribution to all surfaces hit by the beam tree; then do the same for the next light, ...

[Paul-Jan]

Nah, the lightmapper doesn't use a flag, but it does clip the light to the maximum influence light source instead of adding all of 'm together. I think this behaviour was originally introduced to fix some lighting artifacts that do not exist anymore, but I can't say for sure.

It's easy to fix, but I am kinda not allowed to toy around with the lightmapper until I got everything on my 1.5 list implemented.

[Daaark]

I managed to get dual shadows tonight in this scene just messing around.


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