Dynamic Shadows on Mac VMWare

[rwag]

Hello,

I watched the Shiva Minute video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lpd8_avL5yM to learn more about shadows.

In a model I have a material that is a UV wrap that is set to "Receive Dynamic Shadows" (the brown material).
I also have an object on that model with a material set to "Cast Dynamic Shadows" (the metal material).
In the Ambience Editor I set the shadow to 000000 and have "Use normal attenuation" checked.

I added a Dynamic Light Set, and I can see the light changing the brighness etc of the objects.
However I see no cast shadows on the brown area!

I read another post where it sounded like someone found their ATI driver was an issue in Windows.

In order to diagnose this I was wondering if there is a sample game or scene somewhere with dynamic shadows.

Also I was wondering if anyone found the same issue running Windows 7 on VMWare Fusion on the mac.

Many thanks for your advice.

[broozar]

hi and welcome to the forum!

3 things from the top of my head:

1- does your VM use hardware acceleration? for vBox, you'd have to install guest additions, for parallels Desktop, you'd have to do activate it in a panel, for VMWare, i assume it would require something similar.

2- does shiVa use the hardware acceleration?

SceneViewer -> Display -> Render Options ... Hardware Acceleration should be selected.

(click for larger image)

3- you should try one of the ShiVa samples and see if you have any realtime shadows in there. there are indeed several that sport dynamic shadows, like SimpleAnimation (the BoxMan character), CarGame (truck and balls), and iPhoneCharacterControl (character).

[dreamora]

1. Yupp VMWare requires it to be activated in the graphics settings of the VM, default is off. That being said I would push out an osx build through UAT and test the real thing, cause the VM correctness and performance on the graphics end is between abysmal and questionable

[rwag]

Hi there,

Thank you for the welcome-aboard!

Today I re-installed VMWare Tools on the Windows 7 instance, rebooted, same thing.
Also I do have hardware for the Scene's rendering.
For the iPhone Running man game it looks like shadows are not showing (included here).
As far as I can tell the VMWare 3D option is enabled (shown here).

My version of Vmware Fusion is 4.1.1.

Did I miss something in terms of configurations to get VMWare to show shadows?
Should I use BootCamp to run Windows instead or use a standalone Windows laptop?

[dreamora]

Using a real windows is a better idea or not caring about it in the editor and building an osx version to run outside the VM would do the trick already too.

That you enabled 3D acceleration is a first step but the gpu emulation is limited and depending on the fake gpu it pretends to be any halfway smart engine detects it as 'insufficient' (vms often use intel, s3 or generic) and will automatically disable it.

BUT: did you ensure that you are on the high graphics quality running in the editor? just to be sure

[rwag]

Hi Dreamora,

Ah, I think I understand your suggestion on OSX, if I make a build of the game for that I should see everything in-full when running outside the VM. At this stage I still have cycles to go before there is anything author-tool ready, but that is great to know.

Attached is my render settings, using the hardware high-quality from what I can tell.

Thank you as well for the explanation on what is done in VMWare and what engines do with it.

For my next step I will look at adding BootCamp to my system, since I think a native install of Windows 7 on the Mac sounds like the way to go.

As for the product I am very excited to be using Shiva3D and love the book Stonetrip provides. The way the engine uses modules to focus on different aspects, the model inventory etc makes SO much sense. I hope to become proficient enough to provide info in this forum as well!

[rwag]

Hi all,

Just an update. I installed Boot Camp on the Mac with 64 Bit Windows 7.

In the iPhone Character demo I now see shadows on the character and around.

Many thanks again!