Stencil shadows

I've been playing Soul Calibur 3 recently and a few other games, and i've noticed the stencil shadows used, seem to be low poly versions of the model they are cast from.

I mean to bring this up, for the benefit of people doing the stencil shadows systems. Forgive me if this is obvious, but surely most games don't take the model casting the shadow and make a stencil shadow from it? It could save alot of time making a low poly version of whats casting, and use that to build your volume.

I have no idea what people using the stencil shadow systems for B3D are doing nor what commercial games do, but I'm using low poly proxy shadow meshes for my TV3D-based game engine, which uses stencil volumes for shadowing. Two reasons for doing this. Firstly, as you say, it's senseless using a high poly mesh for shadows. No one will ever notice the difference. Secondly, TV3D is very good at handling stencil shadows on imperfect meshes, but most engines with stencil shadows have real problems with meshes which have holes or unwelded vertices, and if you make a low poly version, you can make sure you have a nicely welded mesh with no holes without messing up the visual effect of the mesh.

Ross C said:Gabriel said:This made me laugh. :)

If a programmer who is thinking about implementing stencil shadows and is examining other games to see how they do it can't be sure, I think we can safely assume there's not much visual impact for the average player.

Besides I was talking about MY low poly versions. I have no idea how low poly SC3 may have gone.

If you want objects to self-shadow, you must use the same mesh.

Good polnt. I've never seen self-shadowing stencils that were 100% glitch-free though, which is why I don't plan on self-shadowing. Would that be an issue with B3D though? Do any of the B3D stencil shadow libs self-shadow animated meshes?

DevilChild's do, tho not animated ones, not yet.

Basicly, you should use lowpoly models in the first place anyway. I don't see how I should make a low poly version of a cube or so.

Selfshadowing character meshes DO look good, of course. So maybe a combination of both is the way to go.

I have noticed in several engines every shadow casting object has a shadow priority flag. Depending on the Shadow detail settings made by the user things with a low shadow priority will then be excluded from stencil shadows rendering. The machine even could determine the current detail level automaticly, by checking the current framerate/rendertime.

ogre seems to use your game mesh and its tris for its self shadowing too, so if its really low poly it can look nasty.