Shadows

Forgive me if this is already in here, but I couldn't find an option for it anywhere. I've been struggling to make textures look convincing, and I think the primary issue is shadows, or lack thereof. For example, if you have bricks with recessed mortar, some of that mortar will be in shadow, yet the only area that gets darkened is the bevel of the brick. Take out the bevel, and everything looks completely flat, even if you're using white bricks on a black mortar for the height map.

Also, when you add just a hint of small-scaled noise, it can end up making the entire image look "flat", when the lighting/shadows of the larger height maps should be a lot more prominent. For a quick example, take the default "stones" noise, a "Perlin noise" scaled down as small as possible, and blend them together with the default 50% blend. Using this as the surface height, all you see is the noise. The rock shapes aren't visible at all until you adjust the blending significantly, even though they are clearly visible in the height map.

It would also be nice to be able to generate "ambient shadows" so that they could be blended into the surface color. I'm not sure what the term for that is, but regular projected shadows depend on the light direction, so if you're creating these textures for a game with real time lighting, it wouldn't look right to have them in the diffuse map, but things like areas between stones, or cracks in a wall will almost never have direct lighting on them, so they tend to stick out like a sore thumb when lit up brightly in real time lighting engines (or just the rendering in filter forge), and being able to generate some fake "ambient" shadows to counteract this would be handy. I can sort of do this by tweaking the results of the high pass filter, but it's far from perfect and often results in some things that are downright ugly.

First I was using overlay, but then the highlights show up (in some cases this looks nice. In others, not so much). Now I'm doing some tone curve adjustments and using multiply blending. In some cases, it works well, but others, I end up with shadow spots that are too large (small bumps in close proximity tend to cause this). If I adjust for those, then other shadows don't show up.

We already have the prototype code for shadows (via ambient occlusion, no bent normals yet) but it's terribly slow at the moment. This is not because of the code inefficiency -- the slowdown is caused by the fact that to render shadows for a single pixel we need to have an entire height map already rendered.

Anyway, we'll keep working on this -- shadows are crucial for realism.

Quote
Vladimir Golovin wrote: We already have the prototype code for shadows (via ambient occlusion)

Quote
jitspoe wrote: How slow is "terribly slow"?

Very, very slow. Not hours or course, but long, long minutes and no interactivity with the controls at all.

Quote
jitspoe wrote: Is there any potential to use hardware acceleration for this?

Maybe. We'll look into this after the release.

There is potential for hardware acceleration, but the algorithm (I'm the person behind the prototype Vladimir told about) doesn't need much acceleration by itself, it's the height map that needs to be rendered fully before we can get at least one pixel properly shadowed, so the main problem is the interactivity one -- you won't see _anything_ rendered until all required height map data is calculated, which may take a lot of time.

Nevertheless, I still consider it could be implemented in some future major version, possibly along with hardware acceleration on an SM4-class GPU (nVidia G80/AMD R600 chip).

I haven't worked on textures for a while, but I happened to swing by here and see that shadows have been added.

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

I guess I might be a bit late to the party, and I know this is an old thread, but I'm super excited now. I don't know if it's my new computer, or if there have been some new optimizations, but filter forge seems a lot faster now, too, and it looks like there are some other goodies in the new version as well. Props to the developers. Hopefully I'll have some new filters soon.