Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello!

I was wondering if there are any tips available for getting smooth shadows with the Cool VL Viewer.

I've searched high and low and I haven't been able to find any info. In general my FPS are very high with shadows enabled, but they have jagged edges. I've even tried another viewer where the shadows were smooth, so I do not think it is a hardware issue on my end.

I love the Cool VL Viewer (Thank You VERY Much Henri) and I would be very happy for any tips on improving how shadows look.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Here is how shadows look on my end:
http://imgur.com/EoJwF

I don't get this issue here (NVIDIA GTX460, driver v304.32), so it's definitely driver-related... You can try and enable the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Deferred Rendering" -> "Screen Space Ambient Occlusion" setting), or try and disable the "Advanced" -> "Rendering" -> "Automatic Alpha Masks (deferred)", or pop up the "Debug Settings" floater, type "RenderShadow" in the input line and pull down the combo to play with the various settings...

Also, make sure your driver is not set to override the applications settings (turn off ATI "AI", for example, or any setting in that style).

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) helps smooth the shadows a bit. What I also did is to change the Debug-Setting "RenderShadowBlurSize" from the default 0.7 to 3.0. Helps a LOT.

Please note that that Debug-Setting only has an effect if you have SSAO enabled.

I'm not sure if it is a bug or a feature that this setting only works with SSAO enabled. Henri, do you know if this is intended or not?

I don't know. All I know is that the Cool VL Viewer v1.26.5 renderer is exactly the same as LL's viewers v3.3.4...

Nicolette, I don't know how you found this, but I appreciate you posting the tip.
You are correct, this setting change really helps SSAO shadows "blend in" better with stencil shadows.
I have an ATI Radeon HD card and the current driver, and with the default setting, there was signficant "noise" in the SSAO, making fuzzy or speckled overlays around the base shadows.

I did some experiments and anything above about 1.5 starts to clean up the speckles, expect that as you tune the value, somewhere between 1.5 and 3.0 will look "best" depending on card and driver.

Thanks for the Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO) and the RenderShadowBlurSize debug setting information!

I found that changing the RenderShadowBlurSize to 3.0, and RenderShadowResolutionScale to 2.0 improved shadow smoothness quite well.

Here is what the shadows look like after the changes:
http://imgur.com/TZGEy

Thanks for all of the help!

Careful with changing the setting for RenderShadowResolutionScale. It can greatly impact your framerate. I just went from 27.5fps with RenderShadowResolutionScale set to 1.0 down to 18.2fps with it set to 2.0.