Terrain Lighting/Shadowing System

Finally the lighting system for the terrain's done. Reaction Engine terrains will feature a real-time or rather a 'pseudo real-time' GPU accelerated accurate soft shadows computed based on the sun's or the moon's position. The terrain will not just self-shadow but will also dynamically and correctly cast its shadow on any object on the terrain which will again be soft. The pic below shows the lighting system at work. The sun is at an angle of 20° from the horizon.

P.S. Texture splatting was disabled to highlight the shadows. The thing looks really nice with a proper blend of grass and sand textures. :)

Shadowing system

Real time shadows have long since been a tough topic to deal with in research and games. The only commercial engine to feature omni directional light sources with shadows is the Doom3 (r) engine and only a few will feature it even in the near future. Our engine will be among the few to feature this complex concept of omni directional light sources that cast shadows. This paves the way for a unified lighting architecture. More information will be provided in the private blog, regarding evolution of the lighting architecture. PS: The graininess in the images is due to the animated grain/noise feature in the Reaction engine, it is aesthetic in real time and hardly in a single frame.

Simple 3DS scene

Bump mapped/Normal mapped surfaces

Some screenshots of the Reaction Engine in Action