I’m assuming phase 3 would be PointLights and SurfaceLights being able to cast shadows?
3 Likes
Not so sure about SurfaceLights getting shadows, but yes, light objects will be getting the FiB treatment as well in Phase 3.
1 Like
They have only specified that phase 3 will be for “local light sources” which would seem to imply SurfaceLights as well. I can’t see any reason why they would leave SurfaceLights out and if the Future is Bright studio builds are any indication, they won’t be left out.
1 Like
Roblox currently doesn’t have shadows working for SurfaceLights as of right now. Don’t quote me on this, but I think a while back zeuxcg said somewhere on either the DevForums or GitHub that having shadows working for shadowmaps and not for voxels would be problematic. If he didn’t then oops.
It’s quite possible that later down the line they’ll implement shadows for SurfaceLights, however I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
1 Like
The intention of GlobalShadows is to disable shadows of all kinds. Keep in mind that not all players will be able to see shadowmaps due to the use of dated/slow hardware, so we have to keep these in lockstep.
4 Likes
Not for the next few years. We are focusing on technology that has a wide reach, and aren’t able to prioritize extremely high end graphics features for the extremely small number of users who have the necessary hardware.
2 Likes
We’ve gone back and forth on surface light shadows; I think they were enabled in some FIB builds and disabled in others. It’s not clear yet if we will be able to support them in phase 3.
3 Likes
I hope that shadowmaps alone will stay as an option in the future. I have been working on a few projects which make you look at distanced objects all the time (RTS and other bird’s perspective stuff) and you can clearly see the difference.
Looks dope 
Awesome, i love how you can toggle to shadow property
Wow. ShadowMap is amazing. This might be what finally pushes my team over the edge to adopt FIB.
Quick question @zeuxcg @NeoBuilder101:
Can developers get the option to set the intensity of shadows? 1 = invisible, 0 = pitch black, 0.5 = current setting. This would allow us more creative control over how our game looks and would let us maintain a unique aesthetic.
The “pitch black” shadow would still be affected by light sources and such, but it would completely override the material and color of whatever part it is casted on.
10 Likes
Can we have the option to change the shadow color?
You can already do this with OutdoorAmbient, but be warned it also affects the sunlight color. If you want to make shadows more noticeable, increase Brightness.
Can’t wait until the phase where light sources have higher fidelity shadows 
(Current Voxel/ShadowMap)
(FiB Studio Client v16)
14 Likes
Everything looks great! Except for these shadows casting oddly on specific unions…
5 Likes
For people asking about shadow color/intensity - no, this isn’t planned.
We’re using a correct rendering equation that is, roughly (omitting some terms that aren’t relevant here),
ambient + sum(light color * light visibility)
We model sky as a light source that emits light from the entire sky dome with the color of OutdoorAmbient-Ambient (and visibility factor that depends on sky visibility from the point). We model sun as a directional light source with visibility factor that is computed based on the shadow map.
In this model - this is how real world works! - you can’t change shadow intensity or shadow color arbitrarily without messing the equation up. This is very important when we start talking about multiple light sources.
If you want shadows to be blueish, you should set OutdoorAmbient to be blueish and Brightness to be reasonably high (and ideally the sun light color should be yellowish as noted before in this thread, but we currently don’t have a good way to control this).
If you want shadows to be brighter, you should reduce Brightness and increase OutdoorAmbient to reduce contrast between sky and sun influence.
16 Likes
This is amazing, btw if your using trees with transparency leafs, (Alpha leaves) make sure to take their transparency to 0 and then back to 0.1 to have them cast the leafs shadows too.
Oh and the new shadows seem to cast too on decals
6 Likes
Cool, new features here. But what’s the point of this ShadowMap new lighting technology? Is it a part of Voxel?
If not, why would you add another lighting technology when the main point to remove Legacy is because it was hard to maintain multiple lighting technologies at once?
It’s to make all games look extremely sexy.
24 Likes
This will be a huge change, it being a great change!
1 Like