I wrote about video game shadow techniques on my blog: 📜 30fps.net/pages/videog... I've always liked different ways to draw shadows in games. I went and tried to find visually distinct examples and explain their differences. I hope you'll find it inspiring! - ThreadSky

pekkavaa.bsky.social • 125 days ago

I wrote about video game shadow techniques on my blog:

📜 https://30fps.net/pages/videogame-shadows/

I've always liked different ways to draw shadows in games. I went and tried to find visually distinct examples and explain their differences. I hope you'll find it inspiring!

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Comments

42yeah.is•124 days ago

Great article! Love the variety of techniques you covered.

mjp123.bsky.social•125 days ago

When I worked on porting the two God of War games from PSP->PS3 they used a fancier variant of the render-to-texture shadows. There was low-poly proxy “projector” geo placed on top of the main world geo, like floors and walls. Then the character would pick the closet plane to project onto.

mjp123.bsky.social•125 days ago

After rendering to the texture, that texture was sampled when rendering the transparent proxy geo with multiply blending so it would darken the actual world geo underneath. On PS3 we also blurred the texture, but I don’t think the original PSP version did that.

pekkavaa.bsky.social•124 days ago

I see, so the character shadows were cast always on a single plane only? So either floor or to a wall? I had no idea such tricks were used in practice, thanks for sharing!

mjp123.bsky.social•124 days ago

Yup! If you watch you'll see where it transitions from one plane to another whenever you start the wall climb. You can also see some of the issues where the shadow briefly stretches because of the downward projection, and also at one point it projects "through" the floor: https://youtu.be/qnivOk03e3A?t=7733

pekkavaa.bsky.social•123 days ago

It's obvious now when knowing what to look for :) Thank you for sharing the video evidence!

mjp123.bsky.social•123 days ago

No problem! Thanks for writing the article!

nomadnetic.bsky.social•120 days ago

That was a great read, thanks for sharing it!

tim-rex.bsky.social•94 days ago

📌

zeozen.bsky.social•121 days ago

Good read:D On one game, I did "sphere shadows", where all the player positions were fed into the stage shader to get proximity shadows on walls (lots of wall jumps), and recently I did blob shadows by drawing it all to a separate texture and composited it with field to avoid transparency (mobile)

pekkavaa.bsky.social•120 days ago

The first one is basically "assume a spherical player" and analytical ambient occlusion! 😄

zeozen.bsky.social•120 days ago

Yep:p and the characters were pretty much spheres so that just kind of worked out hehe

zeozen.bsky.social•121 days ago

It's gonna be fun trying out more of these techniques for new games

canmom.art•124 days ago

This is a great article! And it gives me some new techniques to try too so thank you for that as well! (the platform I'm developing for basically rules out reading back the gpu on the same frame, so no shadowmaps.)

jaumeplaf.bsky.social•125 days ago

📌

maximelebled.com•120 days ago

Great article! But this bit here is a factual error: character shadows in all Half-Life 2 games are render-to-texture and not shadow maps.

pekkavaa.bsky.social•120 days ago

Thanks for the correction. Where can I read more about this?

maximelebled.com•120 days ago

There isn't really a page about it that I could find... but here's a video that talks about improving them so that their casting angle dynamically changes according to the nearest light https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHx-ETtlGU

If you look carefully at 1:15, you can see two RTT shadows overlapping.

froyok.fr•120 days ago

There is even a wiki page about it: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dynamic_RTT_shadow_angles_in_Source_2007

pekkavaa.bsky.social•120 days ago

Alright I didn't know they were even literally called "render-to-texture shadows" in the docs. This is very interesting. I'll update the article accordingly. Now I need a new example of early shadow mapping though! 😅

maximelebled.com•120 days ago

Crysis (2007) is probably a good example?

pekkavaa.bsky.social•119 days ago

Thanks for the tip. I went with Far Cry in the end but wouldn't have thought about it without considering Crysis first :)

hermanni.bsky.social•125 days ago

Never played Soldier of Fortune, but is it really lower res than the Crash 3 shadow?
The shadow casted at Crash is a measily 64x64 texture chunk that's occupied in the PS1's VRAM in real time, while the Soldier of Fortune shadow looks more detailed (or at least bigger.)

pekkavaa.bsky.social•124 days ago

True it might be a bigger texture but spread wider. I couldn't find any info on the SoF implementation but it's the Quake 2 engine so it's not GLQuake descendant at least. The shadows don't reach walls so I concluded it's not a shadow map either.

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