On Tue, Sep 29, 2009 at 12:19 AM, Christopher Wright <[email protected]>wrote:
> I have. In the process, I found a really interesting new QC prompt "Maximum >> exceeded Please provide a valid value ... Discard Change/OK. The >> depth/Shadow Polygon Offset doesn't make a difference, or point to anything >> in particular as far as remedying the bug. Good call though, and I didn't >> look at that to start out with. >> > > That prompt is from AppKit (or something similar) -- when you've got text > fields without certain formatters (or with stock formatters, perhaps?), they > generate those errors (necessitating a custom formatter, iirc) -- we ran > into that with Quartz Crystal way back when... Ah, cool! I thought it was a bit clever to get that prompt instead of it just capping out at the top value (though it did feel a little Redmond-esque). > > > In looking at this further, I'm noticing that the shadow from the dae >> sphere doesn't even stop at bleeding through to the backside of just one >> sprite. If I place another sprite a bit behind the first one, the shadow >> casts through the first sprite all the way onto the backside of a second >> sprite. >> > > bleeding through other objects is interesting -- that might imply that > they're not using actual shadow maps (which use the depth buffer, and thus > don't cast shadows "through" objects), but instead some other trick (where > shadows are projected through objects, as a side effect). This definitely > warrants more investigation... > > I'm certainly curious about it how it could be remedied. It seems like it needs to be lopped out and re-implemented entirely. It seems like the approach is probably inherently flawed given the results. Either this, or very specific usage instruction and documentation about when it can be expected to act normally needs to be available. That would help things seem to be more intentional and not seen so haphazard. I give major benefit of the doubt, as far as not expecting every usage scenario to always be possible with a patch like this. > Thanks for poking at the shadow stuff so much george -- it's fun to try and > unravel all its mysteries :) > Well, I probably wrote you a million "gosh, wouldn't is be awesome to have shadows in QC" emails from when I would go over to friends houses and watch them use Playstation/X-Box/Wii and see all of the shadowing and be kind of indignant that this wasn't possible in Quartz Composer. In that regard, I'm thrilled that it simply exists, and that Apple incorporated it into QC4, even if it doesn't work 100% as expected. It has led me to a few scenarios where I've invested a good bit of time in something that is really close to usable, but then I have to entirely scrap it when something like this pops up. However, I love the concept of shadows like this so much, that I'm a sucker for punishment when it comes to returning to using the patch. I was really happy to find that Replicate in Space works fairly successfully (save for also having this problem) for duplicating objects and having it work with the shadows, as a pseudo workaround for duplicating objects with an iterator. This is obviously a really weak workaround, but at least ok for duplicating some cubes/spheres, etc. I've also replicated this with CL Mesh in place of the Sprite, because I thought there might be a chance that it might not happen if everything used the Mesh engine, but it does still happen. I'll spare everyone the similar upload. -George Toledo
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