   Creating shadows after bone shader calculations?
  I am new to shaders.  I was wondering how one generates volume shadows on a model after it has been manipulated by bones in a vertex shader.  I thought that after polygons have been through a vertex shader it goes straight to fragment shaders or is it possible to return data back to the main program in order to create the shadows needed.  Or am I thinking through this too hard.  Should I just make a bones program that works on the cpu? Thanks in advance.   
  bump   ;  The only way you could do shadows would be to use shadow mapping. If you want to use shadow volumes, you will need to do the skinning on the CPU.   ;  Not actually true. There are several methods for doing the shadow volume extrusion on the GPU (see http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1990.asp for one example, although I haven't looked closely at that article). If you do this, you can do the skinning of the vertices on the GPU, followed by the extrusion on the GPU, with almost no CPU work!;  There are at least two ways that skinned characters can be used with stencil shadows.First, you can skin in software (on the CPU), and extract the geometry after skinning. Doom 3 does this (I believe it uses light-facing edge tracing to generate the volumes).Second, you can create a separate shadow volume geometry: replace each edge between triangles with a degenerate quad (two triangles), and use face normals in each triangle. The quads use the face normals for face A on the two vertices making the edge towards A, and the face normals for face B on the other two vertices. Then, in the shader, do a dot between normal and vector to light; if less than zero, extrude that vertex away from the light.   ;  Thanks for all your help :)   