Well first of all I love the updates you guys keep making to sunburn. Really great work.
I am however having a little trouble with the shadow quality in my game. Its so bad that I think it would look better without them currently.
Now I know its something im doing because in all the samples the shadows look quite shiny (Well dark actually but you get the idea) where as the ones in my game look terrible...
Here is a link http://imgur.com/MXqIG.pngIt took alot of tweeking to get it that good... if I turn up the 2 shadow Bias variables I can get the banding on the walls to go away but then the car shadow looks even worse and almost dissapears.
I can't figure out what to do. Please help.All the models are exported out of maya 2009 as FBX files. the car is quite high poly and the buildings are too (just sub-divided for lod testing) oh and the car is about 3 world units wide to give you a frame of referance and im using deffered rendering and its running on a 8800 with all sunburn graphics settings to ultrahigh.
I hope you can shed some light on this.
The ground texture you're using seems stretched...this might have bad influence on your shadow quality being cast on that particular object. I'm not sure if that's how it works, but might be worth a try :)
Contributor on the SunBurn sgMotion Animation Library open source project.
Hi 2.0,
The shadow quality looks very low, make sure the ShadowQuality in the user preferences is set to at least 1.0 (if your game doesn't save a prefs files then the Game class constructor likely setups the preferences).
Also check the Environment object. The shadow fade distance determines how far the directional shadow maps are stretched across the world, reducing the distance will increase the shadow quality.
Let me know if this helps!
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It was the shadow fade distance.
Once I lowered that it was all fine.
Is there any performance sweet spot for the sunburn settings? What are the things that would cause the biggest slowdown but the least graphical improvment?
Is there any point in have shadow quality above 1? I didn't see a differance.
Thanks again for your help.
Hi 2.0,The sweet-spot is project / hardware dependent, but generally we use the following mindset:Medium detail shadows are nearly as nice as High detail shadows, but use 20-40% less gpu overhead. So we generally stick with medium shadows in our examples and internal project / demos.When using deferred rendering the Medium effect detail reduces full-screen fresnel calculations, which reduces gpu overhead a good bit. We use this setting when the project doesn't require fresnel.On the PC the preferences are designed to be set by the player then loaded / saved from file, to tune the game to their hardware. Setting a good all-around default is a great idea, but exposing the options though the game ui is ideal.On Xbox all the hardware is the same, so you have a lot more control over tuning the game, and the preferences can be hardcoded in the game code.Let me know if this helps!