I kinda spent all day creating this model using CartographyShop 4 and it turned out looking really cool…
…I exported the model with the *.x termination and loaded it in Panda… but then I realized that all the shadows where gone.
Why is this happening? How can I create shadows so that Panda can understand them?
Many THX!!!
Shadows are not part of your model, but of your scene. You need to create shadows within Panda3D, unless you have a shadow map.
You can achieve nice shading by setting up lights in your scene.
To achieve real dynamic shadows, thats going to be a bit harder. I believe there was a shader on the forum about that.
I really don’t want to create my lights trough code cuz I have a really complex scene… sooo… how do i create a shadowmap & how do I use it? Do you know a good tutorial or something?(I presume I have to use maya… no?)
Think of a shadow maps as another texture, that is laid over your real textures and contains the shadows. That would be the easiest way to get static shadows in your scene.
i think you just standard shading and it will look good.
Well… Legion is right, a shadowmap would be perfect in this case, unfortunatley CS4 dosen’t create any kind of shadowmaps! Would somebody know a good piece of software that imports and exports *.x and also creates shadowmaps?
Have you tried just turning on lights? It’s really easy to do (one or two lines of code) and may be all that you’re looking for.
You can also turn on the lights in pview with the “l” key. Pview your model, then press “l” to toggle the lights on and off. You’ll see what your model looks like with just ordinary lighting enabled.
David
Yes, of course i tried, but this model has only a few polygons, and the light just dosen’t seem natural!
PS: I’m willing to recreate my model in any other 3DModeling Software that exports/creates shadowmaps, just name one!
PPS: After browsing the forum a bit, I found somebody having exactley the same problem https://discourse.panda3d.org/viewtopic.php?t=2341
Blender can create shadowmaps, but it’s not trivial. I’m pretty sure 3dsmax and Maya can also do it, and it’s probably easier than in Blender, but then again they’re not free.
What is being talked about here is commonly referred to as “light maps”, this can be confused with “shadow maps”. Light maps bakes the lighting onto textures that are applied to your scene. A shadow map is a render from the point of view of the light containing scene depth information. This information is then used to determine what objects are in shadow from that light when rendering the scene.