Trouble with Shadows & Rendering them properly

[Phodex Games]

Hi,

I recently had a lot of fun, playing around with some low poly stuff. Unfortunately a problem occured, I am having pretty often, I haven't found a good fix yet. I dont know, shadow rendering in LW is weird, or I most likley just dont understand it.

Look how, the shadow at the leaves of this tree just disappears, after you are 20 meters away:

This does not really happen (or at least it does not look as ugly) for this tree:

Another example that shows my problem is this. On the right is is how it is rendered in Blender. What I want is kind of the same shadow type, but including an shadow the house is drawing on the ground. And do you see that door? Looks super ugly. I would be glad if sombody can point me towards a solution. I know, that you can take effect on this by calculating the normals, but what settings would you recommend for low poly?

To bring it to the point, this is what I want it to look like. I think the funny thing is that the lightning of the scenes below, are "worse" more simplisitc as the one leadwerks includes, but the shadows are consistent on farer distances and fit the low poly style. I need this for creating a good overall look for my project.

I am thankful for any documentation, information you can give me for setting up a scene like this in Leadwerks. Thanks for your answers in advance!

Markus

[Josh]

Directional shadows get lower in resolution as you get further away. This is how cascaded shadow maps work.

The Blender screenshot has no shading, so I am not sure what the door normals should look like.

The last screenshots appear to be using some kind of static lightmap, which can provide nice quality but will not respond to changes in lighting and characters will not cast shadows (unless it is an overlaid trick using another technique like a projected texture).

Set your light quality to 2, add the SSAO posteffect, enable fog, and set the fog and ambient light color to soft blue and it will look much better. If you want to post the project I will play around with the settings and try to come up with something that looks nice.

[Phodex Games]

@Josh

Okey thank you so far :). I will try your advices and see what I can get out of it, but I actually don't know how to add fog? Is it a Post Effects Shader? Dont find it in my shader folder. As I have time and can't find a solution of my own, I would really like to take your offer, for looking into my project. I just need to create a new project packing the files in, as my current one is a little huge to share...

P.S.: I think I need a lot to learn about shaders, shadow casting and the whole process of rendering, which is a knowledge gap of mine.

[Josh]

Fog commands are here:
https://www.leadwerks.com/learn?page=API-Reference_Object_Entity_Camera

I am adding some controls into the editor so you can also edit them there. Will be included in 4.5.

[Thirsty Panther]

Fog.

Nick has a good series on Shaders.

 

Lunarovich has a Blog post on Shaders as well/

Hope these help.

[Phodex Games]

@Thirsty Panther

Thanks, will take a look at them soon!

@Josh

Ok currently playing around with this commands ^^. Will show the results here as I am done. Thanks!

[Phodex Games]

Wow, this is looking pretty good now. Still did not fix, the shadow problem, but I guess it is related to the model itself. Maybe have to do some cleaning/fixing. Thanks a lot for the tip with the fog, this adds a lot of atmosphere to the scene.

Another thing I found out myself, was, that its a good idea, to disable the shadow casting in the materials, for all the details on the house (Door, Bricks, Windows), but keep the shadows for the basement, walls & roof.

[Josh]

I just added the fog controls in the editor so as soon as the next beta is uploaded you can change the setting in real time and see the result.

This is about five minutes of work: