Shadows Update

I worked a bit more on tiled terrain shadows and fixed a few problems from the previous post, so I'll post a few updated images here.

Scenery Shadows
I forgot to add shadows for the other ground scenery, which includes rocks, stumps, and logs. This has been fixed - they now use the same shader as the tree branches. Everything in the scene now receives shadows.

Leaf Back Lighting
I took a screenshot of the leaf back lighting from the sun during sunrise or sunset (not that there's a difference between them in 3DWorld). The unshadowed leaves on the lit side of the tree transmit some light to their back sides, but the shadowed leaves on the unlit side remain dark. This creates a halo of light around the trees similar to "rim lighting" sometimes used in graphics and photography.

Back-lit trees at sunset.

Here are some examples of real photos of back-lit trees, though they were taken with brighter lighting conditions:
Example 1
Example 2
Example 3


Water Shadows
I finally fixed the mesh shadows on the water surface so that they work even when the water is deep/high above the mesh. I folded the terrain mesh into shadow map creation by determining which tiles fall within the frustum (bounding area) between the light source (sun) and the tile to be shadowed. Any tiles whose bounding volume (bounding cube in this case) intersects the light frustum may contribute shadows and need to be drawn into the shadow map. When the sun is high in the sky (large +z component), only the current tile and it's 8 neighbors in {N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, NW} are included. The neighbors may contain trees and other objects near/crossing the tile boundary that cast shadows on the adjacent tile. When the sun is low on the horizon, any additional strip of tiles stretching from the sun to the receiver tile are included. I was worried that this would be too many tiles, but it turns out that only 3 or 4 additional tiles are needed. The increased shadow map creation time is barely noticeable. Here is what it looks like in a screenshot where a distant peak casts a long shadow across the surface of the water.

Shadows of a distant peak on the water surface.

Mesh Shadows
3DWorld supports importing of 3D models in the Wavefront object file format. These models can be instanced in the scene with various transforms and colors. I have added three instances of the Chinese dragon statue and one instance of the Sibenik Cathedral to my scene. Each object model casts shadows on itself and on the rest of the scene, including the terrain mesh, trees, grass, and plants. Their shadows can extend far across the mesh. Here are some examples of what it looks like.

Shadows from Chinese Dragon models on the mesh, trees, and grass.

Shadows from Chinese Dragon models cast on the terrain from several tiles away.

That's it for now. I'm moving on to implementing reflections for planar surfaces that should significantly improve the wet surface rain effect. This will be the topic of a future post (assuming I get it working).