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Hard-edged Shadow Casting Now we have our lights correctly illuminating their surroundings we can start thinking about correctly limiting their light to add shadows into the scene. First we will cast hard edged shadows from shadow casters and then extend this to cover soft edged shadows with correct umbra and penumbra. This is done in the function we previously skipped, mergeShadowHulls(). You will remember that at this point in the rendering we have the light intensity stored in the alpha buffer. Now what we will do is create geometry to represent the shadow from each shadow caster, then merge this into the alpha buffer. This is done inside the ConvexHull class. Finding the boundary points Our first step is to determine which points our shadow should be cast from. The list of points that make up the ConvexHull is looped though, and each edge is classified in regard to the light position. In pseudo code: For every edge: Find normal for edge< Classify edge as front facing or back facing Determine if either edge points are boundary points or not. The normal for the edge is found as: float nx = currentPoint.y - prevPoint.y; float ny = currentPoint.x - prevPoint.x; Then a dot product is performed with this vector and the vector to the light. If this is greater than zero, the edge is front facing. Once and edge has been classified, it is compared against the previous edge. If one is front facing and the other back facing, then the shared vertex is a boundary point. As we walk around the edge of the hull (in an anti-clockwise direction) the boundary point from light to shadow is the start shadow point. The boundary from shadow to light is the end shadow point. Creating the Shadow Geometry Once we have these positions, we can generate our shadow geometry. Since we are only generating hard edged shadows at the moment, we will be ignoring the physical size of our light source. Image 3 shows a how the shadow geometry is built. Image 3: Hard-edged shadow generation As shown in the image, the shadow geometry is a single triangle strip projected outwards from the back facing edges of the shadow caster. We start at the first boundary point (marked with a red cross) and work our way anti-clockwise. The second point is found by finding the vector from the light to the point, and using this to project the point away from the light. A projection scale amount is used to ensure that the edges of the shadow geometry are always off screen. For now we can simply set this to a sufficiently large number, but later it will be advantageous to calculate this every frame depending on how far zoomed in or out the camera is. We render the shadow geometry with depth testing enabled to properly layer the shadow between various other objects in the world, but with colour writing disabled, only the alpha in the framebuffer is changed. You may remember that the final geometry pass is modulated (multiplied) by the existing alpha values, which means we need to set the shadow to have an alpha value of zero. Because the framebuffer will clamp the values to between one and zero, overlapping shadows will not make an affected area too dark but instead merge correctly. Image 4 : Hard-edged shadows Notice in image 4 how the shadow from the red diamond correctly obscures the green object, and that their shadows are correctly merged where they overlap. Soft-Edged Shadow Casting

Contents   Introduction   Rendering Overview   Hard-edged Shadow Casting   Soft-Edged Shadow Casting   Making it robust   Printable version   Discuss this article