Jo - that's the other thread I was talking about before
Haha, no, I'm just discovering this now. I thought the way Pixie had shadows made sense, but then I commented on the other thread and started thinking about it and observing.
Jo - that's the other thread I was talking about before
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
Well, I hate to be wrong, but I was wrong... Yeah, I can't still work the geometry perfectly, but in some way my mind already agrees that the way I drew it makes no sense. I did some searching, of course, of counter-examples, as a stubborn arze that I am, and couldn't find any - here's the pic that settled it for me:
shadows_study_torrevieja.png
Screen grab from google.earth, a church in a mediterranean village of Spain, called Torrevieja. The roof is clearly more inclined than the sun rays, and yet, all flat surfaces have equal lighting (I did pan around the city, in despair, but it's always like this!). I was indeed drawing the shadow of the roof peak, but the thing is, as I see it now, with your much appreciated help, in a flat inclined surface, each "line" is the peak for the line immediately below, hence all points are under the same "shadow" from the next point above.
In a way, again, I'm a little glad that I redoing my shadows.
And in the meanwhile, many thanks for existing and being the good people you are, folks. This forum is awesome in the way it allows (and drives!) us to learn stuff.
Well your church pic has confirmed something I suspected about my own shadows in Atlas Ward - that they are in fact wrong, because the shadow of the tower falls differently on opposite sides of the roof below it, whereas mine all fall in straight lines on both sides of the lower rooftops.
So it looks like most of us are getting this shadow thing a bit wrong, one way or another
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
I was wondering too about that... so I used sketchup, I choose end of march and 13:00 for the position of the sun, made some houses and turned them around...
Here's the result :
Shadow on trial.png
I just saw the photograph that Pixie put here...
So I made some adjustments :
Shadow on trial 02.png
Shadow on trial 03.png
And what's strange is that it seems (according to sketchup and the photograph of Pixie) that a surface can be "a little bit" in the shadows, or completely in the shadows, resulting on a difference of shadow intensity.
Oh yes
That's why CC3 is so great at doing houses (apart form the shadows those houses cast on other rooftops). The actual shading within the rooftops is accurate to the closest degree. That's because each rooftop has what amounts to a normal map.
You will see it more clearly if you manage to find the ring of rooftops that Waldronate produced on one of the two main threads. I'll have a look and see if I can find it for you.
Found it!
https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...l=1#post324821
If you look at the rooftops in that circle of houses you can see that the highlight and shadow are at their most intense when the roof is angled perpendicular to the light direction, and that they are almost the same when they are close to parallel with it.
That's why I want to import my GIMP map into CC3 to paste the CC3 houses directly onto it, so that I don't have the headache of having to try and work out the roof shading myself.
Last edited by Mouse; 02-07-2017 at 02:14 PM.
Free parchments | Free seamless textures | Battle tiles / floor patterns | Room 1024 - textures for CC3 | GUILD CITY INDEX
No one is ever a failure until they give up trying
Yeah I do mine in 3D to save myself the headache ! More work up front, less for doing any shadows at all.
There are two things to consider withshading and shadows in that a) if you zoom right in on a few cm's of roof then it has no idea about whats going on at another point of the roof. So what applies to shading on one part of the roof is not dependent on the shape of the whole roof, only the shape of that little bit of it. So its all about the angle of the roof to the sun. For shadows, a flat plane is either all in shadow or not. Kudos to anyone who wants to hand shadow those curved far eastern temple roofs tho...
Having said that then there is b) You can get secondary reflections off of walls. So where you have a tower with a roof under it then the walls of the tower will cast a glow onto the roof or into a shadow zone. That sort of thing happens all over stuff on the earth but you get super hard shadows on space ships etc where that doesn't happen. A shadow in space is often very black. Now Falconius has some good rendering going on since he has used this ray tracing thing so you can see those secondary highlights on his renders which is why it looks jolly real.
Lighting is quite hard to do really accurately. But the basics of it are quite simple. But its something a computer can do for you if you tell it what its about in 3D. Its worth the effort.
Last edited by Redrobes; 02-14-2017 at 01:38 PM.
Well, thank you all for the participation on the discussion about shadows. I'm very short on time and I'm behind on reading up this thread, I'll try to get back to it asap.
In the meantime, I did some more linework which I want to share... here is (this time without the draft layer visible, and with all shadows deleted - the one visible is already "recomputed"):
Section 21 _wip_06.jpg