CompuServe Messages

Hi Alexander, Gary is quite busy right now catching up on post-Siggraph stuff, so just let me jump in here with a couple of things: From what I saw at Siggraph, the ray-tracing spotlights are VERY accurate with sharp, clean lines and very high detail. Unfortunately, because ray-tracing is involved, they can slow rendering speed down considerably when influenced by large amounts of geometry. Great for high-res, detailed stills, or animations with little geometry that need VERY accurate shadows. Spolight Overshoot, on the other hand, may be just what you are looking for. It will concentrate shadow-mapping ONLY within the falloff cone while lighting the rest of the scene with an even, bright light. This way you may use a MUCH smaller size shadow map for the important parts of a large scene, get nice shadows, and the rest of the scene will be "bathed" in light, although not completely parallel (depending on the cone angle). I'm sure Gary will add anything I may have left out… -Alan Iglesias