[SOLVED] Casting shadows procedural mesh

Help & Support
1

I succeeded in creating a procedural mesh with everything I need (vertices, uv, normals, tangents and color information). But I can’t seem to make it cast any shadow. I’m setting the castShadow property to true on the mesh instance, but this doesn’t seem to make any difference.

var meshint = new pc.MeshInstance(node, mesh, material);
meshint.castShadow = true;
model.meshInstances.push(meshint);

Anybody with an idea about how to make a mesh cast shadows?

2

Have you also enabled shadow casting for your light entities?

entity.light.castShadows = true;
3

Yes, normal entities (placed in the editor) do cast shadows, also the procedural mesh is receiving shadows from the normal entities.

4

Ok, by stepping through the engine code I found out that on adding a model to a modelcomponent all the meshinstance properties concerning shadows are overwritten by the modelcomponent properties. So the solution is:

var node = new pc.GraphNode();
            var model = new pc.Model();
            model.graph = node; 
            
            //build mesh
            
            this.entity.addComponent('model');
            this.entity.model.castShadows = true;
            this.entity.model.model = model;

Now I still have a problem left, the shadows look terrible as you can see in the screenshot (note that the back wall is completely flat, so why it is showing that pattern, I have no clue :s)

Pasted image1920×1040 495 KB

5

I think this is a bug in the engine. As a workaround, you can change:

        this.entity.addComponent('model');
        this.entity.model.model = model;
        this.entity.model.model.castShadows = true;

To:

        this.entity.addComponent('model', {
            castShadows: true
        });
        this.entity.model.model = model;
6

To get rid of the artifacts, please consult these links:

http://developer.playcanvas.com/en/user-manual/graphics/shadows/
http://developer.playcanvas.com/en/api/pc.LightComponent.html#shadowBias
http://developer.playcanvas.com/en/api/pc.LightComponent.html#normalOffsetBias

7

Thanks Will, I’ll go trough them! Also thanks for your post concerning the castShadows property. Your solution of adding the properties through the constructor looks cleaner!

8

No problem. Regarding shadow bias and normal offset bias, just set them in the Light component UI in the Editor. Try setting both to 0.05.