David has recently been working hard to finish off the Overgrowth shadow system.  Today I’m going to show you the first stages of his direct light mapping system.  David is now using hardware-accelerated depth-map shadowing to render the shadows for each object directly into its lightmap texture.  Both objects and terrain cast shadows nicely on any objects or portions of terrain that they block from the sun.  Last week I introduced you to the fan-made map Foothold.  Here is foothold again with David’s first pass at  direct lighting and shadows:

Even though all this information can be baked into the lightmap textures at compile time for static objects so it won’t effect users at run time, David wants to preserve a pleasant experience for all the OG modders out there.  Therefore his shadow system can update in real time so that level designers can get an immediate depiction of the look and feel of the level they are making.  In my next post I will show you David’s second pass on shadows in full color.  For more Overgrowth news please check out the Wolfire Blog.