Real-time Shadow

Release 0.10.4

Terrain shadow

• Add STPOrthographicCamera as an ortho projection camera, along with STPOrthographicCameraSetting to store settings.
• Add another type of flag to determine which component will contribute to shadow map to traverse() function in STPScenePipeline.
• Add STPBindlessTexture for handling automatic unresident of bindless texture handle.

STPCascadedShadowMap

This is a shadow manager that implements CSM technique. It allows rendering shadow on a large scene using directional light with adaptive shadow quality based on distance from camera to the main scene.

STPSun now derives from this class, STPHeightfieldTerrain has provided users with two options, to cast or not cast shadow.

General fixes and improvement

• Change exception type thrown when validating STPSunSetting and STPAtmosphereSetting in STPSun to STPInvalidEnvironment.
• Refactor Lottes and Uncharted2 tone mapping calculation.
• Move Near and Far setting from STPPerspectiveCameraSetting to STPCameraSetting as these settings are shaded by both types of projection.
• Make all functions in STPImageParameter public.
• Add a new pure virtual function in STPCamera that allows overriding the near and far plane to calculate the projection matrix.
• Add compareFunction() and compareMode to STPImageParameter as well as implementations for all derived classes.
• Add drawBuffer() and readBuffer() for STPFrameBuffer.
• Fix incorrectly calculated tangent and bitangent for terrain unit plane that causes the normal Y direction to be flipped. Also change the unit plane winding order from CW to CCW for consistency reason.
• Fix a repetitive use of RNG in STPLayerCache test program that causes warning due to generation of the same RNG sequence to be generated during test session.
• Change the specification of all cameras. Now they all use callback functions to determine if the camera state has changed rather than having them returned from the camera matrix retrieval call.
• Instead of using an exponential function, terrain LoD shifting now uses linear. Remove ShiftFactor setting from STPMeshSetting.
• Buffer stream in STPWorldPipeline is now initialised as non blocking.
• supply() function in STPBiomeFactory now returns an instance rather than a pointer.
• Remove redundant storage of list iterator in STPSingleHistogramFilter, now the queue returns a moved memory block directly.

Shader compilation

• Add some wrappers function over shader source code in STPShaderManager that allows pre-processing the source string directly rather than messing up other functionalities with the shader class.
• Remove all unnecessary shader include paths from all renderers (STPSun etc.) because all shader source code use absolute path.
• Fix incorrect semantics in STPShaderManager, shader include path should be an relative directory rather than the full name of the include source.
• STPShaderManager now requires explicit initialisation for system shader include. For such reason, added STPRendererInitialiser dedicated for initialisations.