Shadows fading away cause grief
by Konrad Kiss · in Torque 3D Professional · 12/08/2009 (9:41 am) · 1 replies
Solved. It was a mistake on my part. No related bug in the engine.
I'm creating a little tool to better be able to light individual objects. The point is that after I set up my lights, the same setup could be applied to an object in the game's scene. This is mainly for stuff like cut-scenes and actor conversation.
I'm using 3 point lights at an equal distance from the object to be lit. The tool lets me modify light color and brightness parameters to fine-tune the lighting on the object.
It works great when I view the object close up (this is in GuiObjectView), but when I go further away with the cam, the shadow begins to blend away on the object. See the following image:
My question is: How can I make the shadow not blend away regardless how close or far the cam is? I've been trying to poke at shadow parameters, but nothing seemed to have an effect.
Since these are point lights, DualParaboloidSinglePass shadows are used. The same happens with Spot lights, so I'm thinking it must be a common problem with shadows. I however was unable to reproduce the problem in the FPS example desert mission after getting rid of the sun and having only point lights in the scene around the test object.
Any help or pointer would be very much appreciated.
Konrad
I'm creating a little tool to better be able to light individual objects. The point is that after I set up my lights, the same setup could be applied to an object in the game's scene. This is mainly for stuff like cut-scenes and actor conversation.
I'm using 3 point lights at an equal distance from the object to be lit. The tool lets me modify light color and brightness parameters to fine-tune the lighting on the object.
It works great when I view the object close up (this is in GuiObjectView), but when I go further away with the cam, the shadow begins to blend away on the object. See the following image:
My question is: How can I make the shadow not blend away regardless how close or far the cam is? I've been trying to poke at shadow parameters, but nothing seemed to have an effect.
Since these are point lights, DualParaboloidSinglePass shadows are used. The same happens with Spot lights, so I'm thinking it must be a common problem with shadows. I however was unable to reproduce the problem in the FPS example desert mission after getting rid of the sun and having only point lights in the scene around the test object.
Any help or pointer would be very much appreciated.
Konrad
About the author
http://about.me/konrad.kiss
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Bitgap Games
Edit: I just confirmed that it was a bug I introduced. Sorry about the post. I decided not to remove it, since it could give others with a similar problem a hint.