Soft Shadow

Soft shadows are a difficult item to recreate. Hard shadows, where the edge between a shadow and a lit area is absolute, often destroy the feeling of believability. A soft shadow blends that edge, almost like anti aliasing; a fuzziness at the edges. The trickiness comes in doing it in as few clock cycles as possible, and keeping with the intrinsic properties of the item casting the shadow.

Below, we offer a selection of links from our resource databases which may match this term.

Dynamic Soft Shadow Smooth Shadow Soft Shadow

Volumetric Smooth-Shadow

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Soft-Edged Shadows
A coder?s article about creating realistic, dynamic soft shadow in real-time interactive, and complex scenes.

Immersive Newscasting versus Actuality
A quote from "Otherland: City of golden shadow", talking about the probable confusion that could result from a realistic enough, surround news feed versus actual physical experience of a disaster.

Virtual worlds Require Better Tools
When we interact with the world around us, how do we do it? Do we press soft foot soles to the floor, feeling the cold flow up our legs? Bend over the fridge, wiping the hair out of our eyes as we do so, smelling the mix of meats and cheeses within?

Otherland: Is this a real place?
A lengthy quote from the book "Otherland: City of Golden Shadow", by Tad Williams, which sums up the dialectic between physical reality and virtual reality, in one of the most succinct and apt ways we have encountered.

Otherland, Volume 1: City of Golden Shadow

Read this series for the twisting, evolving, many diverse threaded storyline, or read them for the wonderful imagery, and enchanting ideas for VR of the future. Whichever reason makes you pick up one of these, you are in for one hell of a ride!

Large Image Display: Toy Story: 1995's Cutting Edge
A look at the 1995 milestone movie Toy Story, and an interesting question is asked: Why are modern mainstream VRs only just coming out from the shadow of that world-quality, 14 years later?

Large Image Display: AI: Artificial Intelligence: Teddy
Here we see 'Teddy', the faithful robotic companion of our robotic child protagonist throughout the film. Mum has just taken him out of his box, placed him on the floor, and turned him on. He is revealed here to be a fully articulate, yet still light, soft and furry humanoid robot, intended to double as a teddy bear.

A Bland World
Walking through the orchard on a warm summer day, the smells of nature in your nostrils, the soft padding of grass underfoot, you reach up a hand, and grab a juicy red apple from a tree, plucking it delicately. You bring it to your nose and smell the fragrance, then you bite into it. It is like chewing rubber. Completely tasteless. No juice, no sweet flesh, you cannot even detect it in your mouth.

Meshworm: A robot made of a single Artificial Muscle
Meshworm is the prototype proof of concept for a new type of artificial muscle, based on an in-depth study of the movement patterns of the common earthworm, and shows how it is possible to create a 'soft' robot or prosthetic that is basically a single muscle and very little else.

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