Hello Hello! long time no post! Holy smokes you guys have made a mountain of progress!
Quick tip about Realtime shadows on anemic hardware.
When I worked on the PS-Vita we created very low resolution meshes ( which had similar silhouettes )
they were basically 1 sided geo cards to represent on screen Realtime shadows. Some object of course would not be cards but full 3d privative models just depends on what it is you were casting a shadows on. A tree, a car can be very expensive poly wise to raycast but you can make a very low-rez cage that can maintain the rough shape.
This cage would be invisible to the player but visible to the dynamic light.
So rather than having a 2k + mesh being raycast we would make a 100 poly mesh substitute with a good approximation of the shape for real time calculations. that was the secret we we used to keep performance up when dynamic lights were used.
since we are talking about small screens you can barely tell the shadow being cast was of a more privative shape.
of course this was overlaid with as much static lightmap shadows that could muster. always bake everything down if you can!
the less dynamic stuff you have to calculate the more performance. We also tried to pick very specific points when to apply dynamic shadows. a corridor of light between 2 tall builds / mountains just patches of dynamic light.
for environments this only works if its a light that doesn't move much like a static sun / moon - basically not a dynamic day and night cycle with a moving dynamic light.
This video pretty much explains what i am talking about regarding low rez shadow casting meshes. It has a lot of good performance general tips with Realtime lighting - not everything can be applied to the 3ds but it may give some ideas as to how to think of things. ( understand this is to get an idea of what to do not a 1:1 tutorial - you would have to research these topics further )
Video is here:
jump to 10:40 for the low rez shadow caster for cars.
strongly recommended watching the whole thing to get context it is a very good talk!
Quick tip about Realtime shadows on anemic hardware.
When I worked on the PS-Vita we created very low resolution meshes ( which had similar silhouettes )
they were basically 1 sided geo cards to represent on screen Realtime shadows. Some object of course would not be cards but full 3d privative models just depends on what it is you were casting a shadows on. A tree, a car can be very expensive poly wise to raycast but you can make a very low-rez cage that can maintain the rough shape.
This cage would be invisible to the player but visible to the dynamic light.
So rather than having a 2k + mesh being raycast we would make a 100 poly mesh substitute with a good approximation of the shape for real time calculations. that was the secret we we used to keep performance up when dynamic lights were used.
since we are talking about small screens you can barely tell the shadow being cast was of a more privative shape.
of course this was overlaid with as much static lightmap shadows that could muster. always bake everything down if you can!
the less dynamic stuff you have to calculate the more performance. We also tried to pick very specific points when to apply dynamic shadows. a corridor of light between 2 tall builds / mountains just patches of dynamic light.
for environments this only works if its a light that doesn't move much like a static sun / moon - basically not a dynamic day and night cycle with a moving dynamic light.
This video pretty much explains what i am talking about regarding low rez shadow casting meshes. It has a lot of good performance general tips with Realtime lighting - not everything can be applied to the 3ds but it may give some ideas as to how to think of things. ( understand this is to get an idea of what to do not a 1:1 tutorial - you would have to research these topics further )
Video is here:
jump to 10:40 for the low rez shadow caster for cars.
strongly recommended watching the whole thing to get context it is a very good talk!
Last edited by Th3Travler,
