Stencil shadows vs Shadow Maps

[tremanarch 6]

maybe sign the ticket then.. if you post this in steam forums aswell it might get additional attention...

[nodunit 397]

What would that help http://feedback.arma3.com/view.php?id=8233 note the date..

This is not an issue that should have needed a ticket in the first place, the developers should have looked at their game and said "Oh hey the shadows work on some objects but not others even on high settings, thats not right.."

[tinemem 11]

yep, the hybrid system works perfectly fine, and if you prefer cpu shadows, it can be toggled off since it's linked to the shadow options. easily changed in options menu.

but now they will need to add that shadow=hybrid value in all their models, unless there's another way to do it via config.

but i still prefer the latter method that gets rid of shadow volume altogether. i can't stand that boxy look.

oh and i made a mistake earlier. i said you can get rid of shadow lods, that's not true. the game still uses those to generate shadow maps, so best still keep them around. there's another method that they use for the plants, it uses a different shadow lod name, which has a longer draw distance, designed for use with vegetation. those use a special alpha texture to generate shadow maps. stil i'm not too keen on the terminology, but i've found a good resource discussing the shadow system:

http://tactical.nekromantix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=arma:modeling:shadows

apparently this has been a pretty old feature of the engine since the first arma days.

---------- Post added at 19:49 ---------- Previous post was at 19:20 ----------

edit: damn, discovering something new every time:

there is also a method that does not require shadow lods(meaning you can delete them), keep property name "prefervolumeshadow=0" in geometry lod, then go through all the visual lods and delete any "LODNoShadow=1" entry, then under geometry lod put "sbsource=visual" and now shadows will be generated from the visual lods.

to be honest, i don't notice a huge difference, but some smaller things are more detailed, and some flaws are gone. i don't know if there is a big performance difference though.

there is one good thing about shadow maps generated from shadow lods though, in that you can make them larger then your model (reverse face to avoid shadows bleeding through visual lods), and the shadows will be larger.

[roberthammer 582]

All we need is proper dynamic shadows like everyone is using (with all options to customize them) - not just old school stencils ...

also those shadows should not "bleed" through the model

Edited January 3, 2014 by RobertHammer

[artisanal 22]

You have a point Robert, the problem seems to go way deeper, as the lighting system/engine can be quite game-breaking (i.e. lights shining through walls) for many players. And God knows how an ArmA afficionado hates it to be restricted in his "free will" in an open-world game, especially when it results from a graphic engine restriction...

Edited January 3, 2014 by Artisanal

[DaRkL3AD3R 1]

Outstanding posts tinemem. I think it's all pretty clear right now. There are only 2 realistic reasons why Bohemia Interactive have not as of yet made this fix, which so many players seem to wish for:

1) Artistic decision. They might have some skewed view of what looks good and in their eyes believe that hard aliased sharp shadows make sense in some ways (I only agree for first person models, everything else should be shadow maps)

2) They are being lazy about it. It sounds like it's a good deal of work to go through and enable the hybrid shadowing system for every single model in the game and would require as you said, a sizeable download. This is, again as you stated, a foresight failure on BIS's part.

Either way, I am disappointed. But am extremely grateful for your efforts to dig into this where BIS has decided to ignore us.

[tinemem 11]

thanks, with the prefershadowvolume=0 setting, it actually defaults to stencil shadows in first person view. i tried changing this but it may be hardcoded.

[RushHour 11]

Reading this thread i´m interested to know if there are even more things we can do to lift work off the CPU on to the GPU.

[NeuroFunker 11]

imo stencil shadows do look good in vehicles, maybe it's only place they can be used in game, but seein some street lamps shadows, with stencil, looks unrealistic, looks more like a mirror of and object then it's shadows. So i hope, BIS will get rid of stencil shadows as soon as possible, since our gpu's have enough room to breathe, and should take the job, rendereing shadows. Maybe this will give additioal fps boost, to unload cpu usage.

[bad benson 1733]

one problem with shadow maps seems to be small objects. a friend told me the shadow for his weapon was just a blurry blob. no idea if that's related to settings or shitty implementation of the tech or if something was missing.

this whole shadow thing is a good example of an aspect of the game that almost makes it seem like it's down to some interns playing with the game a bit while the main act has moved on to dayZ (no offense to anyone actually still working on arma 3, it's probably not your fault ;) )

[NeuroFunker 11]

And as someone mentioned before, we need much greater shadow cast distance. 200m is just to short. No idea with 2km, but i believe at least 1km shadow draw distance, wouldn't cost a huge performance hit, but will look much better then just 200m like now.

[tinemem 11]

one problem with shadow maps seems to be small objects. a friend told me the shadow for his weapon was just a blurry blob. no idea if that's related to settings or shitty implementation of the tech or if something was missing.

this whole shadow thing is a good example of an aspect of the game that almost makes it seem like it's down to some interns playing with the game a bit while the main act has moved on to dayZ (no offense to anyone actually still working on arma 3, it's probably not your fault ;) )

there are still methods available i haven't tried yet. this one detailed by armored sheep involves alpha mapped textures that can generate much more detailed shadows for small objects. it uses the named property "sbsource=explicit" with a special shadow lod that uses alpha textures. i found no documentation except for this quote by armored sheep:

If you choose shadow buffer casting (used on trees) you can have alpha transparent textures in shadow casting lod (you define this by properties in geometry lod) BUT you will be still limited by texture resolution (ArmA casts this shadow using single 2048×2048 texture for whole scene).

although promising at first, one realizes that the low details of the shadow lod means no matter how high resolution the textures are, it'll be corrupted by the low detail of the shadow lod, unless you are able to use a shadow lod with the same detail as a visual lod and enable "lodnoshadows=0". but i suspect there's a hardcode limit to the poly count of shadow lods.

[AlexVestin 24]

I'm really interested in these methods. From what I've read by you guys on the last pages and the links given, these options below are the working methods(?)

I have not had time to go through it all on my main comp, but I tried to put it here as simple as possible for later testing.

1. SHADOW BUFFER (SOFT SHADOWS ONLY) (NO SHADOW LODS REQUIRED)

Accordingly to http://tactical.nekromantix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=arma:modeling:shadows

-This version above can only render shadows from LODs with 1k polys or less. I have not tested that theory.

Geometry LOD should contain properties:

prefershadowvolume=0

sbsource=visual

Delete this property from all other visual LOD:

LODNoShadow=1

And this one below wich I am very unsure about. Don't rely on this information.

2. HYBRID SHADOW (SOFT SHADOWS) (CAN BE CHANGED TO STENCIL SHADOWS WITH GAME OPTIONS)

Accordingly to http://tactical.nekromantix.com/wiki/doku.php?id=arma:modeling:shadows

-The softer "shadow buffer" shadows are cast on all models and terrain except the model itself wich still use stencil shadows.

Geometry LOD should contain properties:

shadow=hybrid

[UltimateBawb 1]

How the hell is this not fixed yet? It's literally the one major graphical flaw of A3 and makes the game look like absolute garbage when noticed. BIS stop dicking around and fix this FFS.

[PYL 2]

Why haven't shadow maps been implemented yet? I mean... that's a more than 10 years old technology...we are in 2016..

[andersson 285]

unfortunately, every other piece of equipment still uses prefershadowvolume=1, and we can't open those up in oxygen to fix them.

What about hex-editing?

 

If a cunning person makes a batch file it could be run locally making a modfolder with the hex-altered models. Then no BI models are distributed and DL size is next to none.

[Jackal326 1182]

...we are in 2016..

Not yet we're not ;)