Summed-Area Variance Shadow Maps (Demo)

true, i was looking at the blurred paths

thats insane

i favour detailed shadows though, with varience shadows since theyre so expensive to make, i expect u only can do it with a single light ie 99% of the time its the sun, if u look at suns shadows' they are very sharp (no prenumbra), thus detailed shadows are more fitting with reality, also i believe detailed shadows look ascetically better, (simplified example) a person in a room normally doesnt really have a shadow (ie due to the reflected light its so faint) but sticking in one gives the player the person is standing on the ground + not floating in space.
cheers for the mention of the deep shadwmaps (ive never seen them before) they look very nice (but very very expensive)

 

First of all, you have my admiration and commendations for your continued study/interest in VSM.

Currently and as has been the case for as long as I remember, the last sentence above really is important in the scheme of it all (rate of progress, economies of scale... both from the HW and SW side). I have become quite enthusiastic about VSM since last year's GDC (i.e. your presentation) however and if time permits I'll write you an email about my thoughts on things that haven't been discussed here so far.

 

Apparently, the results are deemed acceptable on the current platforms, but especially so on one particular platform. <shrug>

 

Congrats!

 

Congratulations! You definitely deserve it. Keep up the good work!

 

Nice work!

About how to eliminate the light bleeding artifact, I think a simple alpha blending may help:
many games do not render meshes with shadowmap directly. Instead they render the shadowmap into a screen sized, temporary buffer and then put it into the framebuffer at post-processing time. The reason for doing this is that you can do some manipulations on shadows.
Now, when rendering the temporary buffer, set alpha blending operator to multiply or minus, then you wont get bright edges in dark shadow area. Just a quick thought, haven't tested myself.

EDIT: The alpha blending won't work. The shadow edge is not the object edge.

 

Only games with kind of very simple lighting equations do that..and yes, it's an hack..just not a very good one imho. The only non-hacky way to eliminate light bleeding is to reconstruct depth values distribution around a texel in a more accurate way.

 

I'm too lazy to look throught this entire thread. I'm just goign to come out and ask it; what kind of blur do you use? I implemented a gaussian blur, but it still didn't look nearly as this demo.

 

Oh, nevermind. This is a "Summed-Area Variance Shadow Map". Is the source available anywhere? This si still so far beyond my implementation in quality.

 

I wish you could edit posts here. No source because GPU Gems 3; got it. What's the timeframe on that being published anyway?

 

In another week or so you'll be able to do so. It's a usergroup thing. When your title says "Junior Member" instead of "Registered" you'll have edits.

 

Isn't a box blur just a 3x3 PCF? And what's a normal VSM blur?

 

Could you send me an email when you either release the source of this or release the D3D10 demo? My address is the MSN one in my profile.

Hardware filtering isn't helping much. It looks like how this demo does with Hardware VSM, which is not better looking than the summed-area one.

 

Oh, I wasn't combining those correctly. I was trying one at a time, then two, and even then they were in the wrong order. Sweet.