Shadows Question - Fuzziness around edges
by Gareth Fouche · in Torque 3D Professional · 05/01/2009 (11:56 pm) · 6 replies
Hi guys, a quick question, sorry if this has been brought up before.
Some shadow edges look quite fuzzy, as can be seen in this screenshot Brett posted, where the gaps in the boards from the left-most slatted-thingy cast shadows :
Not only is there that fuzz, but it noticeably jitters as you move the camera angle, which is a bit distracting. What is causing that? Is is a bug, an issue with the shadow map resolution, some sort of shadow map blurring function?
Is there a fix/planned fix coming for that? The shadows are, apart from this issue in a few places, awesome! :)
Some shadow edges look quite fuzzy, as can be seen in this screenshot Brett posted, where the gaps in the boards from the left-most slatted-thingy cast shadows :
Not only is there that fuzz, but it noticeably jitters as you move the camera angle, which is a bit distracting. What is causing that? Is is a bug, an issue with the shadow map resolution, some sort of shadow map blurring function?
Is there a fix/planned fix coming for that? The shadows are, apart from this issue in a few places, awesome! :)
#2
05/02/2009 (8:21 am)
I think it has been said before that they are still working on advanced lighting. In any case, change the sun's shadowSoftness value and see if that changes anything. 
#3
The "fuzz" is a shadow filtering technique similar to what is used in Crysis on their shadows. In a real game scene its usually not as apparent. As Adam said... if you go tweak the Sun settings you'll see "shadowSoftenss" which controls how much it softens the edges of the shadow.
Also the darker filtering artifacts you sometimes see in incorrect locations is caused by the estimation technique we're using to save fillrate. It currently only takes 4 samples per screen pixel to estimate if the point is fully shadowed or fully unshadowed... else it takes 8 more samples to generate a shadow value between those two. I plan to see about taking a few more estimation samples to reduce those artifacts.
The jitters on camera rotation are a bug in the cascade shadow maps unrelated to the filtering technique, but it does make it look much worse than it is.
05/02/2009 (10:41 am)
Ok... there are two things here and they are not related.The "fuzz" is a shadow filtering technique similar to what is used in Crysis on their shadows. In a real game scene its usually not as apparent. As Adam said... if you go tweak the Sun settings you'll see "shadowSoftenss" which controls how much it softens the edges of the shadow.
Also the darker filtering artifacts you sometimes see in incorrect locations is caused by the estimation technique we're using to save fillrate. It currently only takes 4 samples per screen pixel to estimate if the point is fully shadowed or fully unshadowed... else it takes 8 more samples to generate a shadow value between those two. I plan to see about taking a few more estimation samples to reduce those artifacts.
The jitters on camera rotation are a bug in the cascade shadow maps unrelated to the filtering technique, but it does make it look much worse than it is.
#4
05/02/2009 (10:45 am)
That specific screenshot is also kind of worst case due to it being very sharp contrast as the source "art" is black and white.
#5
(Oh man it rocks to edit the shadow parameters in real time!)
Ok, the "fuzz" isn't as much of a problem, especially given that we can play with the strength. I'm glad the rotation jitters are a bug though, they attract the eye far too much.
05/03/2009 (1:49 pm)
Thanks for the replies guys. (Oh man it rocks to edit the shadow parameters in real time!)
Ok, the "fuzz" isn't as much of a problem, especially given that we can play with the strength. I'm glad the rotation jitters are a bug though, they attract the eye far too much.
#6
05/04/2009 (4:05 pm)
Logged. 
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