Shadow questions.
polycounter lvl 13
I'm having a problem with my custom shader. Self shadowing shouldn't show on something that is cel-shaded, and yet I have no clue how to disable it and allow it to cast shadows on other things.
What I'm getting.
What I'm needing.
Another question would be how can I affect the cel shading material from shadows
See that just doesn't look right, I would like it if I could get the material to shade the shadow in the cel shader itself instead of just putting it on the gun and overwritting the cel shading.
What I'm getting.
What I'm needing.
Another question would be how can I affect the cel shading material from shadows
See that just doesn't look right, I would like it if I could get the material to shade the shadow in the cel shader itself instead of just putting it on the gun and overwritting the cel shading.
Replies
try out something like this
http://www.moddb.com/games/unreal-tournament-3/tutorials/tf2-shading-in-ut3
I have seen polyphobia's tf2 shader, but I don't like having to use a gradient ramp. And I don't really want to use TF2's style.
In anycase, I need help on disabling self-shadowing and shadows affecting the cel shader.
Self shadowing doesn't seem to have a simple toggle in the mesh, light, or shader.
A quick grep through the UDK script source doesn't come up with options to turn self shadows off, just the known options for no shadows at all or self shadow only.. etc.
I have 2 meshes. The one you see has shadows turned off. The other is a hidden mesh that is a very low poly approximation of the former.
This wouldn't work in actual gameplay though, but it got me thinking. Can I have a mesh only render at an intersection? Like a mesh only renders part that is intersecting with other geometry. I could have my programming create faux shadows.
Or how about having a separate shadow model that stretches and flattens itself on other objects depending on the light vector?
You see I'm just throwing stuff out cause I really wish epic would allow us to turn off self-shadows.
I mean the model just changes art style just because it's under a shadow.
You could code a shadow model/plane to stretch with the angle of a light vector.. would be limited to one light per shadow shape though, and would work best on flat ground.
Since you're doing somethign cell shaded, you likely don't need a lot of the crazy lightmass and highly realistic rendering stuff built into udk, so my suggestion would be to turn off shadows and set up projectors instead. Basically do it the old fashioned way from UT2k4 and whatnot. And apparently projectors are now called light functions.
I haven't experimented with this in UE3, but it may work.. you'd effectively need to do manual shadowing for your static objects.
I don't know how that would work well with light functions.
So I have a couple of ideas. My first being a shadow model. Depending on the angle of the light vector it moves and scales the model on the ground, object, player, what have you. That doesn't sound so hard. But how do I tell it to flatten once it hits something? And how would this work on a skeletal mesh? A static object would be easy, it doesn't move. But a character that can run and jump? Would I need to rig the shadow mesh?
My other question was about HLSL and custom nodes in the material editor. Would recreating my shader in HLSL fix my problem of shadows turning it back into phong lighting problem?
And my last possible solution for the self-shadowing. Even though I can't go in and edit the code to turn it off, I notice that it disappears after a certain distance. Can't I find that part of the code and just.. turn it to 0 or something or have it so small that you couldn't practically get close enough for it to render it.
I'm not sure there's a script or high level solution to what you're looking to do.
IF you absolutely need the day/night cycle then no it probably wont work well. The shadow mesh I was thinking of would be a flat plane. It wouldn't project on objects well. For moving characters it wouldn't work very well at all, and I'd suggest something like a simple fuzzy dot shadow, definitely not realistic, though it depends on the particular aesthetic you're going for as to what kind of detail you need.
Well it's getting there. Fiddling with Modulated Shadow Color and Cascaded Shadow Maps.
Problems left to solves are.
Self Shadowing still rears its ugly head at the half way mark making the weird scratchy shadows. Right now I have the Shadow Cascades at maximum, which I realize is somewhat absurd. Leaving it at default looks fine anyway. That problem will likely only be solved the day Epic lets us just turn the feature off.
And 2, the shadow needs to interact with the material. Right now the specular dots are showing in the shadow and it shouldn't.
What would be really great is if I could get the cel shader to work outside of a material. Use Epic's lighting information to alter the game. Maybe in some kind of pre process?
In any case this is.. acceptable. There's really nothing more I can do.