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The Look of Volumetric Shadows


JOE2TIGER

On your computer, how does Volumetric Shadows look?  

34 members have voted

  1. 1. On your computer, how does Volumetric Shadows look?

    • Pretty Good
      5
    • Same look as yours
      11
    • L0@d of Cr@p
      18


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My specs:

 

1.4 GHz AMD Thunderbird

384MB RAM

266MHz Front Side Bus

 

45Gig Hard Disk

nVidia GeForce3 Titanium with 64MB RAM

 

My question on the graphics setting on shadows, I have made the default resolution for the images as 640x480 to load faster for you folks with dial-up, other people can still look at the 800x600 or 1024x768 resolutions..

 

 

Volumetric - Is it supposed to have jagged shapes like this with the shadows?

volumetric_640x480.jpg

Click here to see the Volumetric 800x600

Click here to see the Volumetric 1024x768

 

 

Simple - Simple looks better to me, but doesn't have the atmosphere volumetric has..:(

simple_640x480.jpg

Click here to see the Simple 800x600

Click here to see the Simple 1024x768

 

Do you folks have this problem?

 

On who's system does volumetric shadows looks very good?

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Take some in outdoor environments or in the temple and you can see that Kyle's shadow on the ground looks like an elongated Kyle and the objects around you cast real shadows.. but on the polys of the characters faces it still screws up...maybe they can patch it so it only puts shadows on the ground.. I kind liked the look in outdoor levels.

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Here is a different setting for the shadows.....

 

Volumetric - Is it supposed to have jagged shapes like this with the shadows? It's ugly. Not only that, the shadows are not consistent when I have it on, it gets irratic..

volumetric_640x480.jpg

Click here to see the Volumetric 800x600

Click here to see the Volumetric 1024x768

drowned.gif

 

 

 

Simple - Simple looks better to me, but doesn't have the atmosphere volumetric has..:(

simple_640x480.jpg

Click here to see the Simple 800x600

Click here to see the Simple 1024x768

 

confused.gif

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I find that the Q3 engine doesn't do shadows all that well. Both JKII and MOHAA have a detailed shadow option and both really slow down the system. I know I don't have the greatest comp out there but a 1ghz duron 512mb ram and gf4ti4400 isn't all that bad either. I don't play at super high resultions b/c I only have a 17' monitor so 1025x786 looks best. Now I've seen other games do projected shadows and not have the frame-rate hit that the Q3 engine seems to have. Maybe these shadows are more of a hack into the engine, not actually part of it. A shame though because I do believe they add atmosphere to the game.

 

COLINMAN

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I'm not sure if anyone knows this, but there is another option for shadows other than the ones listed here.

 

cg_shadows 3 gives a fake volumetric-type shadow, which is cast on the ground but not on the character models. Looks pretty good and doesn't have any of the performance hit & quirks of the true volumetric shadows.

 

That's what I use.

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just imagine the performance impact if it would not only darken the whole polygon. you might be able to calculate the shadow for each vertex and interpolate but that would probably increase the work to more than three times.

 

so let's call it a nice feature of a technology soon to come *g*

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Maybe the upcoming DirectX 9 can do that...

 

anyway, I'm gonna try that " cg_shadows 3 " command and check how it looks.

 

BTW GeForce3 and GeForce4 use their own arch. for graphics and don't hog down the system memory....

 

But, aren't they both supposed to have the ability to draw per pixel to have it's own shadow and light characteristics and do it real-time?

 

grenade.gif

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This type of shadowing, if done right, can look very impressive. The best i've seen is in Obi-Wan for Xbox. Obi himself has very detailed, smooth, and realistic self shadowing. I think Raven played Obi-Wan and liked the effect. They could have, last minute, attemped to add this special effect into Outcast and this is the result. A patch later on could improve the look and framerate drops.

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