How do you get high quality cast shadows on terrain in UT3 without dynamic shadows?

crazyfingers

Here's how my scene looks now:


Here's how i'd like it to look (done really fast in photoshop):


Anyone have some advice for getting cast shadows on terrain? I tried subdividing it more but that just caused it to crash when i baked. Dynamic shadows have proven useless as their draw range is very short.

Any advice is appreciated!

Worse comes to worse i'm going to try exporting the scene as an obj, baking the lighting into the new terrain and inverting the shadows to be the opacity map of that terrain, then i'll import that as a static mesh with the new material on top. Then i'll just place this clone of the terrain a hair above the terrain and have just the shadows show through. Should be doable, just wondering if there was an easier in-game way.

nrek

Check out the last portion of this tutorial on Hourences site http://www.hourences.com/book/tutorialsue3terrain.htm, it may help. If not I am sure there has to be a way to do it, I don't know it though. But before exporting it out and doing all that stuff, making a simple black shadow decal to fake a shadow would be a much quicker ghetto fix.

crazyfingers

Thanks for the quick reply nreck, Baking as we speek, so far no crash . We'll see how it comes out, so far it's taking a bit.

Arg, moments like this I wish i still smoked.

Update: It worked! thanks a ton man , the shadow wasn't too defined though, so i'm lowering the sky light and pumping up my point lights lights. Going from 32 light res to 64 this time, hoping like hell my computer doesn't expode. There's a 1 minute delay on my typing and seeing it show on screen as i type this on account of all the baking going on.

mdeforge

Might not be what your talking about, but you did increase the light map resolution in the surface properties right? Do that and rebuild, and you should get something close.

Or I could have missed the question all together.

crazyfingers

Yep, that's what it ended up being, but i still wanted to try the other technique to see what kind of results i could get.

I hit a huge snag in exporting my terrain as an OBJ, but then it dawned on me...

I can just clone my terrain, crop it down the the small area i want high res lighting on, and just bake that one area at a high res by raising the small plot of land just above the large terrain...


Update:


Here's what i've got so far. I'm really liking this method, i can bake high res shadows into the terrain one small section at a time rather than having to wait an hour to see if it comes out... or crashes. The hard edges are where the high res lighting meets low res lighting. Really hard to see texture seems otherwise.

I'm bummed about the terrain editor though, when i try to crop out a small area, removing tesselations from the lower left is fine, but the moment you remove tesselations from the upper right, it shifts the terrain making it near impossible to get it exactly in place. Not a big deal for very flat terrain, but a pain in hte ass if you've got rolling hills and such. This stuff needs to fit pretty exact to be effective.

Again, if the terrain was able to be exported as an OBJ this process would be frickin' easy and easily set up.