   Character shadows in Oblivion
  While I can see that that shadows used for characters in Oblivon are standard shadow maps, what i dont understand is how they get such high res maps, with little distortion. All I can think of is they use a seperate render for each model from a fake light position, and project each shadow onto the terrain. This seems like it should be slow, becasue of the texture limits per pass. I wonder how many passes they render of the terrain, which already has cross blending, normal mapping, and multiple lights.   
Quote:Original post by Matt AufderheideWhile I can see that that shadows used for characters in Oblivon are standard shadow maps, what i dont understand is how they get such high res maps, with little distortion. All I can think of is they use a seperate render for each model from a fake light position, and project each shadow onto the terrain. This seems like it should be slow, becasue of the texture limits per pass. I wonder how many passes they render of the terrain, which already has cross blending, normal mapping, and multiple lights.That's probably exactly what they're doing.It's not as slow as one might think when care is taken to minimize overdraw and batch as many projected textures (or shadows) as possible into a single pass for the object that they affect.I can project up to 16 high-rez character shadows in a single pass on a piece of terrain.  The only reason I actually go with fewer than that is because housing 16 "high-rez" (i.e. 1k) per-object shadow maps is too much of a video mem hog.  So, some happy medium balance must be struck.