Webgl 2 Shadows

[Sebavan]

Hello,

Thanks to Webgl 2, we have been able to introduce two new kind of shadows: PCF (improved version of poisson sampling) and PCSS (contact hardening shadows). They are only available on Webgl 2 and will fallback to poisson sampling on other devices.

Here is a quick shot at how contact hardening tries to simulate real life by getting softer when the blocker is further away from the receiver: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#ZT8BKT#2

And a real use in a scene with self shadows: https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#EYEPRI#3

As usual, the doc have been upgraded: https://doc.babylonjs.com/babylon101/shadows#percentage-closer-filtering-webgl2-only

And to properly setup self shadow: https://doc.babylonjs.com/babylon101/shadows#self-shadow

Hope you ll enjoy it.

[jerome]

topissime !

[Hersir]

@Sebavan Thanks for great work.

Tested example with helmet  on my mac mini, have 60 FPS on Safari but thats Webgl1, but on chrome and firefox (webgl2) get 4 fps. 

Expected? Hardware issue?

Device: 

Graphic: Intel Iris 1536 MB

CPU: 3 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory: 16 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

 

Browsers:

Chrome:  65.0.3325.162 

Firefox Quantum : 59.0.1

[Sebavan]

Could be explained by only using an integrated GPU cause in PCSS, it requires 98 taps on the depth texture per pixels.

Could you try this: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#ZT8BKT#3

I used the lowest quality and it should run faster ?

 

[Hersir]

@Sebavan

This has 10 fps.

(Test on MacBook pro with similar specs)

 

[Sebavan]

As expected, this requires a big GPU to benefit from it, I guess we could add the fallback to the scene optimizer to ensure it works cross plat.