Is it possible to exclude geometry from a particular shadow casting light in a deferred rendering pipeline? If yes, can it be done correctly or are there limitations? This is mainly to reduce the rendering cost of each shadow casting light.
In UE4 this is currently not possible and one of the staff members simply replied with a rather cryptic message:
"Unfortunately, this is not possible with Deferred Rendering."
Since we are rendering the depth map from the light's perspective, we should be able to exclude geometry from that render pass...? Are there edge cases that I am not thinking of when combining shadow casting lights with deferred rendering?
Link to forum post (and screenshot to follow in case the link goes down): https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/feedback-for-epic/35667-exclude-object-from-a-specific-light
Answer
At a conceptual level, yes, the decision of what gets rendered into a shadow map is entirely yours. You can choose to include or exclude whatever geometry you want from the shadow map generation process, and this will mean that the generated shadow map will make it so that any visible objects not in the shadow map will not cast shadows. You can even make invisible objects cast shadows if you like.
But the answer you found was not about the idea of shadow maps; it was specifically about whether Unreal 4's implementation was capable of doing this. According to the reply you were given, the UE4 scene graph system is not capable of doing this, of having there be a difference between which objects in the scene are shadow casters and which objects are part of the visuals of the scene.
You could probably modify the engine to allow this, but the point of the response is that this is not a feature of the engine as it stood in 2015.
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