Soft shadow in Doom3

[LeGreg]

Actually you can see some "bugs" when the shadows move during the screenshot. Of course once the screen is taken, the errors are blended together and you have something nice.



The heat effect also generates some green artefacts when you take a screenshot bigger than your screen:



I'm also wondering if they optimize texture placement.
(in my head if the LOD is low, even jittering shouldn't help unnless you render at a much higher resolution but I may be wrong)



A couple more:




Not too many spoilers

 

[Reverend]

Reverend, the other thing only needs a "1" or needs to have a value equal to the radius we put in r_lightsourceradius?

Don't know what other thing you're talking about as I only mess with r_lightSourceRadius . PM me?

 

[epi]

Curious how did you get the soft shadows to work with the multiple samples? Heh or did you freeze time and do it manually?

demoshot (Makes a demo that displays only one frame, names them to shot001, shot002...)

playdemo shot00x

r_lightsourceradius 1-8 depending on the situation (i e if the light source is too close, higher values would cause too much flickering for the shadows)

screenshot 1024 768 24-128 depending on the situation

For the shot seen above, I'm also using other tricks for overall image quality. Humus tweak, Humus' advice to make specular highlights more pronounced, Demirug tweak, plus r_lightscale 3 or 4 (4 I guess) and r_gamma 1.2 are used.

That demoshot/playdemo thing is a must for image quality comparisons.

Just copy&paste the links below or they will not work

No spoilers:
http://www.doom3tweaker.netfirms.com/soft/soft09.JPG

No spoilers:
http://www.doom3tweaker.netfirms.com/soft/soft10.JPG

The second one uses a higher value for r_lightsourceradius and more samples

 

[Reverend]

demoshot is useful but I've never used it before.

Anyway, what I use is the following :

bind F11 "r_lightSourceRadius 5;screenshot 1024 768 128"

Works fine. Use different r_lightSourceRadius values for experimentation. Same with rez and # of samples. Don't use too high a r_lightSourceRadius value if you're snapping screenshots at really high rez (like 4096x3064).

 

[Thowllly]

demoshot is useful but I've never used it before.

Anyway, what I use is the following :

bind F11 "r_lightSourceRadius 5;screenshot 1024 768 128"

Ah, much better than using demoshot, thanks...

Works fine. Use different r_lightSourceRadius values for experimentation. Same with rez and # of samples. Don't use too high a r_lightSourceRadius value if you're snapping screenshots at really high rez (like 4096x3064).

Just wanted to point out 4096x3064 is not a 4:3 resolution. 4096x3072 is...

 

[Cryect]

Well I can say then something about my computer dislikes both those methods you guys did. I was using the one reverend did but each sample has the lights in the exact same jitter position.

They jitter before the screenshot but stop jittering during the screenshot and don't jitter at all in demoshot mode.

 

[Farid]

Well I can say then something about my computer dislikes both those methods you guys did. I was using the one reverend did but each sample has the lights in the exact same jitter position.

They jitter before the screenshot but stop jittering during the screenshot and don't jitter at all in demoshot mode.

I had the same problem you have, just use a "clean" DoomConfig.cfg, and a non-graphical tweak autoexec.cfg and it must work ok.
Some graphical tweak seems to dislike soft shadow, obviously, which one i don't know.

 

[991060]

Rev, why don't you drop JC an email directly asking how to enable shadow buffer in DOOM3(or you already did and he didn't reply)?

 

[Richard]

The thing I was using was "r_jitter" and I was asking if that cvar was a toggle or if I needed to set "r_jitter 4" if I set "r_lightsourceradius 4" or whatever. Anyway, going to try Rev's method.

991060: It would be great if it was functional but the Exp path crashes in my system (9800 Pro) even though "gfx" shows it can be enabled.

EDIT: assuming the Exp path is required for shadow buffers of course.

 

[epi]

Well, I use demoshot because I don't think there is an optimal solution for all cases like 5 r_lightSourceRadius and 128 samples, I guess it's better to experiment with different values for different shots. That's what I tried to explain by saying "r_lightsourceradius 1-8 depending on the situation (i e if the light source is too close, higher values would cause too much flickering for the shadows) "
If you check the last two shots that I've taken, you'll see that they are at the same location that the third shot LeGreg has taken, but with different sampling and r_lightsourceradius values and they all look different.

 

[Cryect]

The thing I was using was "r_jitter" and I was asking if that cvar was a toggle or if I needed to set "r_jitter 4" if I set "r_lightsourceradius 4" or whatever. Anyway, going to try Rev's method.

r_jitter is used for jittering for AA I believe. Kinda pointless in normal mode and it seems to automatically set it to something when you take a screenshot.

 

[Richard]

Yeah, that's what I figured when it wasn't working

Btw Reverend, you might want to take a look at the cvars starting with "r_sb_"

 

[Cryect]

Well after clean install still doesn't work on my computer but doesn't really matter

Yeah, the shadow buffer (though it sounds like shadow mapping by the variables) looks interesting but doesn't seem to be any way to utilize it.

 

[Reverend]

Yeah, the shadow buffer (though it sounds like shadow mapping by the variables) looks interesting but doesn't seem to be any way to utilize it.

Er, it's not shadow buffer.

 

[Cryect]

Hmmm, Screen Buffer then?

Hopefully you will be explaining in more detail those cvars then in your article.