Shadow Lights

[andylegate]

Quick question:

Does a light still enable the avatar to cast shadows if it's been animted? (IE, the light itself is moving). I've never tested this.

[tachzusamm]

Enable? I don't think you mean overriding the "enable shadows" setting in the GUI?
If you mean if the avatar simply does cast shadows from moving lights, I would say yes - when I think about how it worked in Teledahn.
Never tested this too, though.

[Doobes]

I just tested this with Blender...and yes, the shadows still work with an animated light. The shadow moves properly as well. For reference, this was with a regular lamp, but I would assume it works with any light.

[andylegate]

Thanks.

Apparently I have the falloff value in Cyan's Plugin set too small for the Shadow component. My non-moving lights were casting the avatar's shadow just fine, however the swaying lamps were not, and I just noticed that the falloff value for the "Shadow Light" is set at 10 where the others were higher.

[tachzusamm]

Now I've got a question, Andy:
Does the Cyan plugin allow us to set falloff values for lights and shadows independently?
I mean, can you set for example the shadow casting distance to 10, and the lighting distance to 30?

(It always bothered me that for some lamp types my avvie still casts shadows when he is not even lit any longer by the lamp when doing this with Blender. Seems falloffs for light and shadow are exported unbalanced from the PyPRP plugin - IF they can be set independently.)


Oh, and did increasing the falloff distance help in your case? I experienced the shadow appearance is also influenced by the lamp's energy; if set too low, the shadow isn't visible any longer.

[andylegate]

Yes, the Cyan Plugin allows you to have different settings for Falloff for both the light and the shadow casting. Energy of the light will significantly affect the shadow visability too.

This is because the light's parameters are where you set it's falloff, etc. Where as the Shadow settings for a light are a Plasma Component that you assign to the light. You have Shadow Light, Shadow Caster and Shadow Receiver.
Caster and Receiver are used on objects in your game. like if you had a desk lamp that was a shadow light, you can assign Shadow Caster to various objects in the room, like the desk, and have Shadow Receiver for like your floor, rug, walls. It works great!

You can also achieve something like that with light maps, but I've not experimented with those and Cyan's plugin yet.

[tachzusamm]

Thank you.

Now this gives me ideas. Does somebody know if there's an option in the PyPRP plugin to set the shadow emitter falloff different to the light's falloff as well? Maybe via AlcScript?

Or, this way: I normally avoid to use too many lamps (let's say not more than 6-8 in an area). Now, if the shadow emitter is done by a separate plasma component, wouldn't it be possible to replace "light and shadow emitting" lamps with a light emitting part (ray shadows off) and a shadow emitting part (shadow only), without the risk of increasing lag/plasma load?

I assume this:
- When you use a lamp with "ray shadows" set to on, PyPRP exports this as two parts: a) a light emitter and b) a shadow emitter ==> two plasma components
- When you use a lamp with ray shadows off, it's exported as one plasma component
- When you use a lamp set to "shadows only", it's exported as one plasma component as well.

Is this assumption true?

[andylegate]

I would assume this should be possible, as if you look at the Plasma plugin, once you create a plasma runtime light, you then select New> Shadow> Shadow Light plasma component to assign to it. And under that component, you have these options:



As you can see, you can tell it to cast shadows only, not light. Cyan uses these in some of their Ages.