u/zemledelec

I’m working on shadow rendering in OpenGlobus, a WebGL globe renderer. The attached video shows an intermediate experiment.

Initially, I tried to solve the entire problem using CSM. Shadows renderer spans an enormous range of scales. Mountains may cast shadows across many kilometers, while the same scene also contains nearby buildings and other local objects. So, I haven’t abandoned CSM, I’ve abandoned the idea of using it for everything.

The direction I’m currently exploring is a hybrid approach:

• Shadow maps covering relevant ground regions for large-scale terrain and mountain shadows.
• CSM around the camera for nearby objects and finer local detail.

The next step is to combine these approaches and make the transition between them stable.\

Has anyone here implemented a similar hybrid solution? I’d be particularly interested in how you placed and updated the terrain shadow maps and combined them with local CSM.

Thanks!

Hi, A few weeks ago I started implementing cascade shadow mapping in my library(no CSM yet), and struggled with poor shadow quality. Then I found about variance shadow mapping technique from this article:

https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-ii-light-and-shadows/chapter-8-summed-area-variance-shadow-maps, from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXI8rWiOF0k explained some differences.

I still not sure I will stick with it (tweaking depth biases somehow make the picture quite decent as well), but I like the result, and wanted to share it here.

Thanks!

#webgl #javascript #shadowmapping #terrain #openglobus

I was experimenting with projective shaders in OpenGlobus and found a fun side effect: they can be used as square-shaped light sources.

The idea is simple: project depth from a camera, then use it as a visibility map for lighting.

Even shadows work 😄

While improving text rendering, I found several limitations and edge cases in the existing font pipeline: special characters, outline quality, and glyph sharpness were not as good as they should be.

So I migrated the pipeline to MTSDF and integrated atlas generation based on Chlumsky’s excellent msdf-atlas-gen.

The result is cleaner text, sharper fonts, better outlines, and a more robust font rendering pipeline overall.

Live examples:
https://sandbox.openglobus.org/examples/moon/moon.html
https://sandbox.openglobus.org/examples/mars/mars.html

Chlumsky’s msdf-atlas-gen:
https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdf-atlas-gen

I made it with openglobus javascript library. Beautiful and handy library. Check it out.