The importence of SL Shadows (screenies inside)

After having a good long play with the new Shadow Draft R5 viewer and lighting i found a few other hidden goodies that will enhance SL ALOT!!

check this screenshot out...


the top 2 images are the standard viewer (1.20) & the bottom 2 are the new Shadow Draft R5 viewer

Both viewers all settings were set to Ultra, other than that nothing has been changed, the sky presets used are the default force midnight/daytime ones

NO textures have been used, its all the default bumpmap textures (found under the bumpmapping section in the texture tab)

Features of the Shadow Draft R4 & R5 Viewers


*Shadows (obviously!)
*Shadows do work with transparent textures, adding great tree shadows and sky window shadows (The shadows are cast when the object is more than 75% opacity, or the areas on the transparent texture that have more than 75% opacity)
*Lighting inside will give the very edges/corners of the room u r lighting a slight shading effect, for more depth
*True Bumpmapping (reacts to light sources and the sun/moon)
*Specular Highlights (Make a surface shiny and place a light near it, and it will reflect and yes even the colour)
*Per-pixel & sharper Light (infinite lights on screen, u would be suprised at how much better it looks)
*Shiny + Bumpmapping makes the surface look more scattered, for a more realistic effect
*The shiny effect with the sun on the water (the white glowy bits) now gets blocked out by shadows (so if u are inside eg a sewer the sun no longer reflects in the water giving an unrealistic effect)

Hope this helps a few people out, most notibly people making next-gen items etc

The viewer can be aquired from
http://www.armyof4.com/Kirstenlee/Kirstens%20SD2-R5.exe

Instructions on activating shadows...

# Boot the client, set your graphics settings to max.
# Press ctrl+alt+d to enabled the ‘Advanced’ menu.
# In the ‘Advanced’ menu go to ‘Debug Settings’.
# Find ‘RenderDeffered’ and make sure it is set to ‘FALSE’.
# Find ‘RenderUseFBO’ and set that one to ‘TRUE’.
# Go back to ‘RenderDeffered’ and set that to ‘TRUE’ also.

Either you will get awsome lighting and shadows, or there will be no change.

Post your shadow screenies here

The bottom left image you provided is a different scene from the upper left meant for comparison. I'm also not sure of the lighting setup because that's a dramatic change from then intended wall coloring.

Beyond those observations, of course people should want shadows. The sad part is people squealing with glee. I'll use the same aalogy I've used elsewhere on this topic: adding shadows to a 3D engine in 2008 is like adding a print feature to a word processor five years after release - it should have been there from day one. Shadows are usually a standard feature of a 3D engine and have been in regular 3D use since the mid to late Nineties. Instead of jumping for joy everyone should be asking "what took so effing long?"

One last comment: you mention true bump mapping. This is incorrect. For true bump mapping Second Life's texture tab needs to support a minimum of two images per texture: the standard texture and the bump map (if you aren't going to go as far as supporting other 3D texturing tricks). Bump Maps are just that, maps applied to the underlying image to achieve an effect. The current bump map options read like a generic texture map from Photoshop 1.

That's true for the current client... But the same feature in the shadow client does render light reacting bump effects. (^_^)y

Well at this moment in time SL generates the bump maps for you (so yes, it is true bump mapping) but i am pretty sure that once it hits either first look or RC then they will have a new prim multi-texturing feture

i have heard from some pretty solid sources that the new materials editor is tied in with the shadow first look, but we will have 2 wait a few months b4 we can get our grubby hands on it via LL

I mentioned the bumpmapping in the other shadow threads. Have you got me on mute?. Do you want killing?

The most significant difference I can see is this: With the old viewer, I can tell what I'm looking at. The "enhanced" viewer appears to produce a scene with perhaps 1/2 the light, with a nasty yellow tint over all. I can't be sure it's same scene as in the top picture; it's too dark to tell what anything is.

What am I supposed to be seeing?

That is due to the lights themselves being orange/yellow. i forgot to set it to night-time mode on the main viewer.

the scene is supposed to look dark and danky, but the same scene in the normal viewer looks crappy and over-bright (even at night)

also bump-mapping works really well, i will post another screenie a bit later, comparing exactly the same settings,night/day and view on both viewers

ALSO be aware that the room you see in the new viewer is in shadow and shadows tend to make things look darker

Shadows are building up an unstoppable head of steam now. They HAVE to come soon - perhaps the First Look could be dusted down and activated so we can try shadows.

I'll have a go with the method suggested above, but I'm not too confident I have a suitable graphics card.

Hm, this step leads to instant and painless crash of the viewer here (GeForce 7600GT).

More pics please! This is fascinating!
Thanks
Handyman

Works for me and the shadows are nice but it is so slow that i can not use it at the moment.
I have around 4 frames/sec with shadows turned on and that only if i turn AA off, with AA i have under 1 frame/sec - my card is a 8600GT and i guess you really need a monster setup to run that viewer with a good fps.

Dylan/Zakalwe: A series 8 geforce or newer is required to even support the code, an 8800 Ultra is considered *minimal* for the shadow draft.

I only have a minimal knowledge of the technical details of how 3D graphics work.

However, I do know that some play-by-internet games have done 3D graphics shadows pretty well for several years, running on less-than-top of the line graphics cards. So I wonder what the technical reason is that shadows in Second Life would require something significantly advanced.

Wow. Somehow I never fully appreciated just how very exclusive this is going to be--and for what a long time. And based on the screenshots, the difference is so dramatic that one will really have to build either for shadows or for no-shadows.

We had a taste of this problem of different builds for different viewers when WindLight was introduced (heck, even "shiny" and "bump" before that), but this is more pronounced and considerably more exclusive.

If I'm thinking about this correctly, the vast majority of SL users won't see shadows for several years after the first few do. So for a really long time, the applications of "building for shadows" will be limited to screen capture and machinema, done from those very top-of-the-line machines.

Note that I'm not saying that's a bad thing nor that all new features must have universal immediate applicability; I'm just observing something I hadn't before realized.

Wonder if maybe I'm missing a point: Is there talk of being able to streamline and retrofit the code later, post-draft, to a broader set of current cards?

Agree. The top pictures are better in my limited poor eye-sight opinion.

So i guess to run this viewer with a good fps and AA you better shop for a GTX280 SLI or a ATI4870 Crossfire - thats around 800 to 1200 US$ for the graphiccards alone and needless to say you need a big powersupply for this babies. I think the graphic engine from SL needs a really really big makeover because this hardware requirements are higher then for the top of the notch games that you can buy at the moment - Assasins Creed is harmless compared to that.

I have big doubts that people will invest that kind of money to see SL in all its glory and so i fear that shadows want be a very nice feature that nobody will ever turn on.

Is the yellow light supposed to be sunlight or are the ceiling lights making things yellow while leaving the scene dark?

I looked at my own builds and i had no yellow lights so i guess it comes from the ceiling lights and you have to be very carefull with lightsources in combination with shadows enabled viewers.

nope, i have a test system that is now classed as just below standard system

it has a GeForce 8600 256MB, 1GB Ram, WinXP, Single-Core 2.4GHz athlonXP and it ran fine, a bit laggy in some heavily built up places but playable (avarage fps was 43 empty areas and 15 in built up busy areas)

That is because aside from the player avatars, none of the buildings and stuff in the 3D games that you are thinking of ever move, or change. So all the shadows for static objects can be pre-rendered, to display a specific time of day. In many cases, you might only see a given scene at one specific time of day.

In SL, the content changes constantly, and is not controlled by the "game maker", so any shadows have to be rendered real-time and "on the fly". That is far more difficult than displaying pre-rendered shadows for stuff that never moves, or that only moves along a predetermined path.

I downloaded and tested the Kirsten viewer. The viewer worked OK but I was unable to get shadows to appear. I tried several times, following the instructions of the OP. The graphics card is an ATI Radeon 2600 - so I'm told!

Probably an older revive of the topic but I really need help with something please. I installed the RC7 of this viewer and did exactly what it said... set all details to Max, then enabled FBO then enabled Deferred. However, when I enable RenderDeferred from Debug settings it just jumps back to False after pausing the client for 1 second (as long as I have Basic shaders on). It looks as true but once I deselect the little Debug Settings window it shows jumping back to False.

Why does it do that? How do I fix it? I have an ATI Radeon X1300/X1550 Series video card with Catalyst Control Center if that matters. I want to get the shadows working very much so can anyone tell me what I must fix in order to get DeferredRendering to stay on and not jump back to false when I select it? Thanks lots.

looks like crap (ok maybe not crap, if it were 2003) and requires a cray to view it

where do i sign up?

i wish they would quit cramming MORE crap onto the already laughable 1999 core tech, thats why it requires outrageous hardware to do whats considered primitive and commonplace

burn the current viewer, get with some people who DO know how make an engine and start over please

At this point in development, at least, I believe it's because the viewer doesn't support deferred rendering on your video card. Or your card doesn't support deferred rendering.

It's still experimental, so maybe there's hope it'll work for you sometime down the road. Personally, I don't believe that card is capable of doing justice to Windlight, so I wouldn't hold my breath.

It still has issues, and isn't even close to being ready for prime time. I do believe the R6 and R7 viewers look a lot better than the screen shots in the first set suggest.

A couple snapshots from the R7 viewer:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30680137@N05/sets/72157608106463161/

It does take a pretty good video card to run acceptably.

That is weird... it should normally support it. My video card is quite modern and I also have the latest drivers updated just yesterday. I couldn't find any info about my video card series not supporting Deferred Rendering either so normally that shouldn't happen.

Could it be some kind of setting? Are there really no walkarounds such as other Debug Settings to try and combine? Any way to get more info about what causes this issue also? I'd really be grateful if someone could help me get this running if it is possible somehow... I'm just not yet sure if it could be a setting or just an incompatibility