It remains a bummer that it seems like no production game engine has shipped a solution for shadowing area lights, or if they have, nobody has written anything about how to do it
-
Show this thread
-
Replying to @antumbral
Somewhat related: I think it’s a crying shame that nobody has ever shipped irregular Z-buffers for anything. I cringe every time I see ugly shadow maps.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton
I suspect it's been shipped in some form in games and just not in a way that maps directly to it. I can see how it probably ends up being avoided due to the data structure being unfriendly, though...
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @antumbral @pcwalton
Hierarchical Z is an irregular z-buffer if you squint, and we've got those in hardware on many modern chips. Some engines do it in software too (I think both Frostbite and whatever Splinter Cell runs on do it)
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @antumbral
Hierarchical Z isn’t an irregular Z as used in the literature because it has fixed resolution. The whole point of irregular Z is that you get pixel-perfect shadows regardless of the resolution of your Z buffer.
2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton @antumbral
See https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ba56/9459fb4036bb374eeac335868b6f94e63578.pdf … — it’s an ingeniously simple technique and it’s so satisfyingly correct that it seems obvious in retrospect
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @pcwalton
oh, the way they choose sample points is very clever!
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
And what’s really cool about it is that it can theoretically improve performance because it doesn’t render any objects that aren’t in view of the camera into the shadow map, whereas CSMs or whatnot waste time rendering things visible from the light but not the camera
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.