projectmutants-blog

[projectmutants-blog]

Shadows and dust

Welcome, dear reader to the first blog post of the development of our first game project  “Mutants” using our in-house game engine “Cellbox”. This blog will cover some of our technical advancements during development.

Cellbox is a voxel engine of which you can read more about on our site: http://www.cellbox.io/

This blog post is about shadows and lighting. Our graphics programmers implemented shadows utilizing the variance shadow maps (VSM) technique this week.

The way we render our geometry is with the help of a raycaster and raymarcher to detect visible voxels that are resident in our data structures. Previously, we haven’t been able to implement shadow mapping due to the fact that we only could detect voxels inside the main camera’s viewing frustum. For the shadow mapping to work we had to develop a new way of handling our voxel data and upload all of it to the GPU, this is done with sophisticated compression methods and level of detail schemes but that is to be covered in another blog post. If you are familiar with shadow mapping techniques you know that the scene needs to be rendered from the point of view of the light source.