[Soc-2013-dev] Weekly Report #10 BGE LoD and Bug Fixing

[Daniel Stokes]

== Progress ==
Cascaded shadow maps have proven to be a little more difficult than I
originally thought. The idea is simple, but finding clean ways to implement
parts of the code in Blender has been a bit of a problem. However, I have
made progress on cascaded shadow maps. The cascades are being properly
rendered to a single texture atlas, and I have created a shader that can
read the appropriate  cascade from the texture atlas. Furthermore, I have
created new UI to control the number of cascades (1-4). Unfortunately,
there appears to be a problem with the cascades closer to the camera (the
last one shadows correctly). The matrices corresponding to those cascades
are handled a little differently, so they may not be correct or not
correctly transferring to the shader.

I also spent some time getting Git setup on Windows and created a Git
branch (I didn't want to create yet another SVN branch) to store shadow
improvements in instead of patches. Currently I have the cascaded shadow
maps and point light shadows in that branch.

The branch was created from Moguri's svn clone to avoid the hours required
to set up such a clone myself:
https://github.com/Moguri/blender/tree/shadow_improvements

== Next Week ==
I have spent longer on shadows than I wanted to. However, I feel one more
week could really help get all the work polished up. I will see what I can
do get cascaded shadow maps fully working as well as point light shadows
(haven't had a chance to look at that artifact yet). As well as bringing in
some of the other improvements/research from the previous weeks. After next
week, I will stop working on shadows and go back to tackling bug reports
from the BGE tracker.

== Problems / Questions ==
Not much other than going too far down the rabbit hole.
I may need some help finding a way to pass some camera data into the shadow
shader code. We'll see if I can figure something out (there are currently a
couple of hard coded values).

Regards,
Daniel Stokes
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