Oh hai, I has shadows!

Thursday, June 19, 2008 / by

[UPDATE: July 27, 2009] Please note the dynamic shadows are now included in the official Release Candidate viewer. To enable them, make sure you have atmospheric shaders on, then go to Advanced menu Debug Settings, make sure RenderDeferred is set to False, set RenderUseFBO to True, and then set RenderDeferred to True.

Dynamic shadows in Second Life! Woohoo! :) When Torley posted his movies showing the experimental shadows feature, I instantly wanted to test them out as well. The feature is for NVIDIA GeForce 8 series graphics card (or better) and is not yet available as an official viewer, but it's not too hard to find the patch - either one to compile yourself, or compiled by one of Second Life residents.

I absolutely love this feature. It adds to the atmosphere so much! I decided to go on a little vacation on Bahia island and recorded some footage to share with you:



Isn't it sweet?

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10 comments

  1. Omg! That's awesome! I can haz shadows too? Where do we find the preview viewer?

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  2. wow that looks really great and not only that just a great overall bit of video. Nice work girl!

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  3. @Jelly
    Haha, yes, I totally love the feature :) There is no preview viewer yet, only a patch installed on RC viewer. It's very early stage of development and it's not very stable. For example I crash each time my camera moves under water or when I try to teleport through search (landmarks and map work OK). It's good for machinima but not yet for everyday use. Also, it messed a bit with my official viewer and broke my SLURLS. But it was totally worth it ^^ So if you're not scared of all that and have GeForce 8 series graphics card (older cards won't be able to handle shadows), you have two possibilities to get it. One is to go here and compile it yourself, which is probably not something you wanted ;) And the other possibility is to download the patch compiled by Vittorio Beerbaum. Just remember you do that on your own responsibility :)

    @Rock
    Thanks Rock :) It was fun to make!

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  4. Hi there, nice greetings from Germany to Poland. During Euro 2008 you were not so successful :-P but how could I miss this SL feature ?! Great post ,btw...
    And most deffinitely : Gorgeous Avi you has :-D

    Yours,
    Gunter Gustav

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  5. I really hope they make this a main feature one day as it look amazing! But if they do, I also hope they have a way to switch it off totally so old computers can still play - everytime they introduce a new, great feature (windlight) it reduces the playability of those who can't keep up with the hardware needs.

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  6. Hey! You made it to the forums!:

    http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=270701

    Shadows in SL - by Ayumi Cassini
    This was:
    Originally Posted by Zante Zapedzki (in Resident Answers)

    =====================
    Here's a video of the shadow draft client, I don't know where to download it :[

    [url]http://youtube.com/watch?v=fHjibHylkkU&feature=related[/url]
    ======================

    ...here's the blog of the lady who made the video:

    [url]http://ayumicassini.blogspot.com/2008/06/oh-hai-i-has-shadows.html[/url]

    - Infrared

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  7. I posted your video in the forums and linked to it in my blog. Thanks for bringing this to everyone's attention. :]

    http://tinyurl.com/57wp85

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  8. @HBA
    Thanks for info! It's amazing how many people are interested in this feature. Can't wait for this to be included in the official viewer.

    @Andrew
    Thank you, Andrew :) I'm happy you liked it.

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  9. Hi Ayumi, wow shadows are so cool .. wish I would have seen this a week ago .. I just put up my first SL movie .. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qr01LJJq2cw

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  10. That is a lovely video KellyJo! Can't wait to see more from you, this time with shadows :)

    By the way, the shadows are now built into the regular SL viewer, but they are still experimental. If you have a video card that works with shadows, here's how to turn them on:
    1) Go to Advanced -> Debug Settings and make sure RenderDeferred is set to FALSE
    2) Set RenderUseFBO to TRUE
    3) Now set RenderDeferred to TRUE

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