Shadow Casting Point Light Demo

[Simulan]

This long-awaited engine feature is now available in the form of a straightforward, easy-to-use, and highly performant demo program. This demo includes a convenient self-contained file to implement such an effect using only built-in engine components! Check out the in-game 1080p60 footage below, and my new itch.io page where I host the demo program.

complexpbr Shadow Casting Point Light Demo

As a bonus, the program also demonstrates usage of the recently released complexpbr 0.6.8 Soft Shadows for this specific scene.

I am quite pleased with how these feature implementations are shaping up. Effective game design and scene graphics are naturally artistic pursuits, and even the best renderer couldn’t make up for bad direction in those areas. But getting to this level of graphical quality and robustness in Panda3D is really nice to have.

[Thaumaturge]

Impressive! Well done on getting this working with Panda-native elements!

[rdb]

@Simulan

Although Panda3D does not natively support shadow casting PointLights

Just for the record, Panda does natively support shadow casting PointLights.

[Simulan]

Ah. It was my understanding that this functionality had never been demonstrated here, and that there were some conflicting interactions in terms of using set_light() and the same shader internal shadow map. I can change my wording on this and just say it’s the first PBR-style point light shadow effect available in a demo/sample program here, if that’s acceptable.

@rdb

PointLights can not cast shadows. Only DirectionalLight and Spotlight can, and of those two it’s better to use Spotlight because it’s slightly easier to setup and less likely to produce certain types of artifacts.

@rdb

As you say, they cannot coexist unfortunately. You get that error because shadowMapCube is not a recognised name. It must be named shadowMap

The way around this is to pass the point light as a separate variable rather than via the setLight mechanism (which reads them into p3d_LightSource array). You can just pass the PointLight NodePath directly to a named shader input with setShaderInput, and use a different struct definition with cube shadow map to read in that shader input in the shader.