Horde3D

What would be the smartest way to create blob shadows? Blob shadows are gray circles projected onto the terrain to give the illusion of shadows from natural lighting. For an example check below Mario's feet and under the trees here.

Unity3D uses so called "Projectors" for this. I'm guessing the lights in Horde3D are similar. Has anybody done something like this before and used them for something other than projecting light?

Hi polygoff,

The "blob shadow" technique Mario 64 used was a simple decal method where they make a quad mesh (in mario 64's case, it was more like an 8-sided top of a cylinder with a vertex in the center) and did basic ray tests to the ground per-vertex and offset it on the Y-axis so it didn't have bad z-fighting, so this approach was more or less cpu-bound and has a few flaws but worked well for the simple world geometry (triangles 20 metres long or so).

A more modern approach using Horde 3D might be to use a light node which is parented to the model above the character/object's top, directed to the ground and assign a special material context to it, and in the shader/material project a blob texture from it or even render the model off-screen to a render target texture with a black colour shader and then use that as a texture instead of the blob, sort of like Half-Life 2's shaodws for objects (pre-episode 2).

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-Alex
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Thank you for the reply MistaED.


What irks me about this is that they are still called lights and have values like ShadowMapBias attached to them when they themselves are the shadow. Is this the (albeit hacky) way to go? Would static decals (bullet holes etc.) be implemented like this as well?