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Soft shadows II
Sunday, September 19, 2004 | Permalink

Executable
Source code
SoftShadows2.zip (1.1 MB)

Required:
Pixel shader 2.0
Vertex shader 1.1
This demo implements a more dynamic version of soft shadows than the previous one. The light isn't restricted to a predefined path, nor does the geometry have to be static. The basic idea is to first generate a hard shadow using regular shadow mapping, then blurring it as needed. Special care is taken to ensure that shadows and light doesn't bleed over from the background or foreground by scaling down sample weight with difference in depth.

A good thing with soft shadows is that they can easily be combined with lightmaps for static lights, while combining dynamic hard shadows with lightmaps can look a bit odd where some shadows are soft and others are hard.

This demo should run on Radeon 9500 and up and GFFX 5200 and up.

2004-09-22: Should work on nVidia cards now.