First of all, as shown above, I completed (I believe) the shadow-shader that I recall mentioning last week. The technique has its limitations, but for the purpose that I have in mind for it, I feel that it works.
I said above that the shadow is cast by nothing, and looking at the gif above you might indeed note that the shadow appears to rise alone. But I didn't mean that there is no in-universe shadow-caster--I just haven't gotten around to modelling that character yet. Instead, I meant that on a technical level the shadow is cast by nothing--or rather, is not cast at all.
The fundamental idea is fairly simple: the ground and wall on which the shadow "falls" have two shadows painted into their vertex-colours, and a special shader shifts between the two.
However, a simple fade wouldn't produce the effect of the shadow moving over the surface, I imagine.
Instead, the manner in which the shadows are painted describe their "influence": The shading of the painted shadow describes the movement of the shadow, sliding from areas of full intensity to cover those of near-zero intensity. Since vertex-colours are interpolated, this shading is (in part) produced automatically.
A single value controls the "state" of the shadow at a given point in time: when the value is at "zero", one shadow appears; when it is at "one", the other is visible; and the shadow slides from one to the other as the value changes.
In the shader, this is achieved by comparing the shadow-colour value of a given pixel with the control value. For one shadow, the higher the control value, the more of its pixels are shown; for the other shadow, the opposite is true.
(This is all somewhat roughly speaking. For example, I actually painted my shadows as "darkness", so "full intensity" means a colour of "zero", which is intuitive to paint, but a little counter-intuitive in the shader-logic.)
In last week's blog post, I recall that I described a particle editor that I was working on. This, too, was finished in the week just past. (Well, there are a few features that it lacks--there are no controls for removing forces or particle-systems from an effect, for example--but nothing that I'm terribly worried about right now.)
And with that working, I went on to create the particle effect that sparked the endeavour in the first place: a small, pale fire, which has been placed in the lantern associated with the "distant light" that provides direction in level two.
Returning to the level itself, I gave some time to the wooden elements of the level.
For one, I created windows to fill in the window-frames.
The modelling itself wasn't terribly difficult, but I did run into an issue with the vertex-count.
Taken individually, the window-model didn't have a terribly high vertex-count, I don't think. The problem was that there were over eight hundred windows in the level, and the vertex count very much added up--at one point the windows took the scene's vertex-count from around seven hundred thousand (I think that it was) to over two million!
With some effort--including replacing some geometry with a normal map--I managed to reduce this count; I believe that I now have the vertex count at a little below one-and-a-half million.
The other issue was in placing all those windows. As I said, there are over eight hundred, and while some might be skipped (such as those in the prefabs), that still made for an awful lot of fiddly, tedious placement.
On top of that, I have static, non-traversable windows boarded up to indicate that they're non-traversable. But I didn't want the boards placed in exactly the same location on each window--that would make for obvious repetition, I fear.
So I wrote a script to automatically place the windows, then adjust the location and rotation of the boards. This involved some fighting with Blender (placements, especially when objects were parented below others, didn't work as I expected), but in the end it worked, and I have my windows placed, I believe!
(I will likely want to join the various windows together before I next export the scene, as they make for a rather high number of scene elements, and superfluously so, to my mind.)
I said that I gave time to the wooden elements of the level. Aside from modelling the windows, I also created colour-textures and normal maps for those wooden elements, whether windows, floors, ceilings, or planks. This called for some adjustments to various UV-maps, but went fairly smoothly (if at times somewhat tediously), as I recall.
And once again, a number of smaller changes and fixes were made that don't seem worth mentioning here!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
