box lights or spot lights?

[madifier]

I'm going to be working on a large project custom story, and I would like to get the template items out of the way before diving too deep into decorating the individual areas. (me decorate well? yeah right.)

ANYWAY.
I was experimenting with the spot light in place of the setting sun or moon for atmosphere, but when I loaded up the area in-game I noticed several problems with the shadows: broken shapes as well as a shadow bound to the user. Strange as it was, I haven't been able to fix it. Something else I noticed while searching for my problem is that shadow casting is costly in processing speed.

My question:
Should I place multiple box lights around an area to make fake shadows of large rocks and walls, or should I continue to aim for the one spot light? Which will be easier on the user's computer?

[Rapture]

(1a) Spotlights really far away make blocky shadows.

(1b) Change the Alphas of them to 0, that will save alot of performance.

(1c) Use a low intensity boxlight if you have moon (or sun) out + spotlights.

About the "broken shapes" can you a post a image? I'm not sure what your talking about.

(1d) Boxlights don't generate any shadows that I'm aware of.

[madifier]

(1a) Spotlights really far away make blocky shadows.

(1b) Change the Alphas of them to 0, that will save alot of performance.

(1c) Use a low intensity boxlight if you have moon (or sun) out + spotlights.

About the "broken shapes" can you a post a image? I'm not sure what your talking about.

(1d) Boxlights don't generate any shadows that I'm aware of.

1a) alrighty, I'll have to try a different position then
1d) correct. The fake shadows I'm talking about are... take a 3x3 grid for example, place box lights at each section except one, so an example would be a candle at location (0,0), a wall or curtain at (1,0), the grid point (2,0) would not have a box light or perhaps a darker light than the others. So 8 box lights are creating what a single spot light would do. But I'll try your recommendation of a closer spot light.


  broken shadows.jpg (Size: 73.77 KB / Downloads: 170)
The spot light is approximately the same angle as the sunset. I don't think the house shadow is suppose to look like that.

[Rapture]

What's wrong with your skybox? :x

Shadows are somewhat arbitrary, but I would suggest tuning down the Reach of the spotlight so the ends aren't so shadow sharp.

[madifier]

Interesting. thanks for the help with the light suggestions.

(tilts head) my skybox? For the moment it's a filler until I come up with something better or fix the pixelation that's in it. You like?

EDIT:
I made some changes in the level editor and found my spot light was set to low res shadows. that's what was causing such poor quality shadows. Seems like every time I turn around the level editor, material thing, or something either doesn't load right or crashes spontaneously. I may just make that my signature. XD

[Acies]

Create a gobo instead Saves performance. Simply imagine how you would like the shadow to look. Paint a black and white image of it. White = light, black = no light. Save as a .dds image --> Load on your spotlight.

[madifier]

Create a gobo instead Saves performance. Simply imagine how you would like the shadow to look. Paint a black and white image of it. White = light, black = no light. Save as a .dds image --> Load on your spotlight.

I may use that when I'm indoors, dungeons and the lot, but with close to 130 outside areas, I might have to bite the bullet on performance. Thanks for the suggestion though.

Yes, you saw correctly, 130 areas and coupled with indoors that'll probably jump to 150+ at least. Probably be a year before I'm done. If your curious about the project, I'll give more details at a later date.