CompuServe Messages

Tim, no doubt, shadow mapping is not the only and best solution, and you can do alot to make them look wrong or ruine the effect. But this can easyly be done with anything in 3D animation, just place one triangle wrong and the object will look bad. What I mean is: I want this option so I can decide if it's better for the specific animation or not. In many cases it will speed up rendering. BTW, there is hardly any 3D program that does not have shadow mapping. 3DS users complained about shadows and Autodesk added raytraced shadows. Cool, but it uses raytracing only for shadows, the rest is still scanline rendering. They use the advantage fo accurate raytraced shadows and the advantage of fast scanline rendering. How about this Mike? Raytraced softshadows definately look cool. I used to experiment with light arrays and the effects is very nice. I know two programs that have soft shadows in raytracing. POV and Alias (there might be other, too, but I can speak only about these two). Both use dithering in the shadows which is no good for animation since the shadows will start to bacome "alive" in the animation (different shadow dithering in each frame). Alias suggests not to use soft shadows in animations. POV doesn't have animation support, but I think it would look the same. So there are always pros and contras in every technique and I'd like to have the all (yeah, I want it all! <g>) so I can choose the right for the individual task. -David