Material that is fullbright, but receives shadows as if it's standard ?

[motorsep]

Is it possible to have a fullbright material, which receives shadows as if it was standard material ?

 

For example, if I add stage with blend add to a standard material, it becomes fullbright, but then any shadow that is cast on it looks so faint, as if it's not even there.

 

Thanks.

[SteveL]

It sounds like you're doing the right thing, but you'll only see the shadows if the fullbright stage is very dull in colour.

 

Fulbright surfaces aren't affected by what light hits the surface. Shadows show up only where light doesn't hit. It sounds like you are looking for a compromise -- full brightness where light hits, but noting where it doesn't. The only way to do that would be with a different interaction shader.

 

It has to be an interaction shader, not just any old shader, because the shadow information will be available only while drawing light interactions. Unless you changed that with your soft shadow implementation.

 

The standard interaction shader tests whether a pixel is lit, then calculates the colour using surface normals, light direction, diffuse, specular and bump stages. You want a stripped-down version for your special surfaces that does the shadow test then just uses the texture colour as the output, ignoring all the other factors.

 

The only other thing you could try is toning down the brightness of your "blend add" stage -- say rgb 0.1 -- until the shadows show up.

[nbohr1more]

Yeah, this is probably within the province of a custom ARB or Cg shader (in your case) though it may be possible to use a few blend modes

to approximate a sorta threshold effect. "Blend Blend" is more reactive than "Blend Add" but obviously isn't fullbright when blended with a diffuse stage.

[motorsep]

I see. Probably modifying interaction shader is the only thing to do.

 

I have been brainstorming lightmapping, and it's absolutely doable without any engine modification, if only shadows were cast on fullbright surfaces as if it was normal surfaces.

[nbohr1more]

Hmm, blendLights can have forceShadows as I recall. You could use a spectrum material that is paired with blendLights at the same

spectrum. The problem being that you'd need to have one blendLight for every real light to make it look right which would be detrimental

to performance.