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Use lower LOD for non-PSSM shadows?

by Oscar Velzi · in Torque 3D Professional · 02/01/2011 (10:51 am) · 4 replies

One of the features I loved most in 1.1 was the ability to set this preference ($pref::PSSM::detailAdjustScale) and make the PSSM shadows use the lower LOD in my models, which made us save lots of polycount and increase or FPS.

I was wondering if there's a similar feature for non-PSSM shadows (paraboloid, cubemaps, etc.) since that will help us greatly with interiors in our game.

Thanks!
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Associate Tom Spilman
Sickhead Games
#1
02/01/2011 (2:14 pm)
We could have a similar type of scale for other lights, but since most of the time these are much smaller you will save much less and the switching would be much more visible.

Right now the focus is on bugs, but i'll keep it in mind.

Oscar Velzi
Iron Tower Studio
#2
02/01/2011 (7:48 pm)
Sure thing, it would help us quite a bit in our case due to the type of game we are making and how we structured the interior models. Thanks for responding!

Oscar Velzi
Iron Tower Studio
#3
02/25/2011 (9:44 am)
BTW, Tom, can you point out where the change can be made? And I'll ask my programmer to do it. I'm more interested in using the smaller LOD as a "shadow mesh", without changing (so that the game uses always the smaller LOD for shadows no matter the distance.

Associate Rene Damm
#4
05/04/2011 (1:17 pm)
You can see how in PSSMLightShadowMap::_render the TSShapeInstance::smDetailAdjust and TSShapeInstance::smSmallestVisiblePixelSize values are temporarily changed. You can pretty much transfer the same thing over to all the other shadow map types' _render methods.