Terrain Shadows

[TokisanGames]

It would look way better if the terrain generated shadows way off into the distance. However calculating it from directional light will kill performance. For all hardware it would be great to remove shadow casting from godot entirely and put it in the shader.

Not accurate:

Max Shadow distance

Solutions

On pages 38-41 of The Witcher 3 presentation - Video

---

Alternatively, @Calinou suggested

It could make sense to support baking a shadow texture for the terrain, although this requires having a fixed DirectionalLight3D angle. It also won't on dynamic objects, unless these use a custom shader to sample the shadow texture below them, like in this game.

Baking ambient occlusion could be more worthwhile, including for higher-end use cases, as it can add large-scale AO that SSAO struggles with.

Using a lower LOD level for shadows by creating a dedicated shadow mesh is also an option, but you need to make sure the shadow mesh's vertices are always "below" the original mesh to avoid self-shadowing artifacts.

[TokisanGames]

As mentioned in #175, this depth parallax shader code has an aspect of self shadowing that might be of use here

https://github.com/piellardj/parallax-mapping

[TokisanGames]

@lfxu suggested:

The best solution would be making the largest shadow split very large, and only renders terrain. However, I assume that's not something you can do without modifying Godot itself.
Shadow mapping is a different issue from light() [shader] complexity. light() only consumes the rendered shadow map.