I have an ARKit App using SceneKit to render.
I am using a directional light that casts shadows onto an invisible floor plane. In order to do this I have to (?) use shadowMode = .deferred on the light. But this results in the ugly self shadowing in the image:
How can I avoid this and still keep the shadow on the floor plane? The lighting seems fine with shadowMode = .forward, but then I get no shadow on the floor.
There are few methods that could fix this problem.
To use .constant SCNMaterial.LightingModel.
To manipulate with SCNMaterialProperty
To manipulate with categoryBitMask of the node and the light source.
Hope it helps!
Related
I have a placement marker (a simple plane with green corners) to visualize detected planes (via ARRaycastResult) in an ARView. This placement marker uses UnlitMaterial with a texture. Everything works fine as long as there is no other object added.
When I add another object, RealityKit also adds grounding shadow (invisible plane) right under the object. It works as a shadow plane and occludes everything behind it - including my placement marker.
Here is a picture of the placement marker (part of which is hidden under the shadow plane):
Is there any way to prevent this clipping? I was lookig for something like rendering order (as ARKit does have one), but have not fond anything in RealityKit yet.
I would like to keep the shadow plane if possible.
Edit: Added official name of the invisible plane (grounding shadow)
Reality kit automatically adds "grounding shadows" if the AnchoringComponent.Target is of type "plane". According to an Apple Engineer this can be aso simulated using a DirectionalLight with a Shadow and placing a plane (with an OcclusionMaterial) under the model. So the grounding shadow is probably also made out of OcclusionMaterial. This also explains why this grounding shadow occludes other objects.
There is an option to disable rendering of these grounding shadows. It can be done by inserting of disableGroundingShadows option into ARView's renderOptions property.
arView.renderOptions.insert(.disableGroundingShadows)
I have not yet found a way to override OcclusionMaterial (if any).
In the WWDC 2017 video, apple explains about a trick to add shadows by using a directional light. Adding a directional light will cast a shadow and adding a plane will show the shadow. But I cannot seem to find mode and colour options of the cast shadow property. I am not looking to do this programatically. So is there any way there is to change the shadow type to Deferred in Xcode?
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2017/604/?time=2715
If I understand your problem.... Then this image explains what you are trying to do using scen view in Xcode.
You are right, adding plane and directional light with Deferred property will cast shadow. You have to set the x,y and z values of all your scene objects accordingly to show this in a proper way.
I am learning ARKit. I'm placing Virtual Objects in Augmented Reality scene and struggling in these problems!
I am using this demo project from github
1- How to add only one directional light for all (separate) nodes in SceneView of SceneKit & Move directional light with camera position? So that my added shadow can also move with light direction.
If I translate the object shadows are working as it should be. But If I rotate object now shadow should not move on the plan. They are moving because of light is at fixed position.
2- Shadow is looking fine only in case If I add only one object on the plane. But If I add two or more objects more directional lights are adding in SceneView. Now every object has more than one shadows. I want it to restrict only one shadow.
I have added light and shadow plane in sceneKit editor. (not programmatically). Here are my scenekit editor's screenshots.
3- I have read and confirmed that shadow are adding only If I set directional light property to deffered. But in this case app is crashing If I call remove all nodes from sceneView's root node. My removing nodes code is.
self.sceneView.scene.rootNode.enumerateChildNodes { (node, stop) -> Void in
node.removeFromParentNode()
print("removed ", node.name as Any)
}
You can watch my apps video for more clearance. Apps video, How it is working now
My requirement is to add only one shadow for every object. When I Rotate and translate objects shadows should look real.
I also have tried it as removing light from scn file of vase, and add a separate light.scn file having only light in it. added These two (vase and light) nodes in sceneView. But No shadow is appearing.
Directional lights are interpreted from the shader only with their direction (that one light-red vector coming out of the node in Xcode). It does not matter where the position of the light is. Directional light are often used for imitating sun light.
I implemented a similar project so here is my attempt.
I added one directional light from a separate SCN-File to the scene when I initialize the SCNScene.
My settings for it:
castsShadow: true
mode: deferred (my App is not crashing, if I remove my objects from the scene :/ )
And actually thats it to make it work in my project.
One thing about your planes: I think you have not disabled castsShadow on the planes. Therefore a user can see the planes.
Edit:
I could reproduce the crash. It does occur when removing the directional light. Thats why the app is not crashing in my project. So you could do it like me and add the directional light in viewDidLoad() for example.
I can only get shadows to work for spotlight, but not for directional light.
Has anyone out there ever gotten it to work? (Using Swift, if that should matter.)
You need to set the scale property of the light e.g.
lightNode.light?.orthographicScale = 50
Try this:
lightNode.light?.automaticallyAdjustsShadowProjection = true
I am currently trying to set up a rotating ball in scene kit. I have created the ball and applied a texture to it.
ballMaterial.diffuse.contents = UIImage(named: ballTexture)
ballMaterial.doubleSided = true
ballGeometry.materials = [ballMaterial]
The current ballTexture is a semi-transparent texture as I am hoping to see the back face roll around.
However I get some strange culling where only half of the back facing polygons are shown even though the doubleSided property is set to true.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
This happens because the effects of transparency are draw-order dependent. SceneKit doesn't know to draw the back-facing polygons of the sphere before the front-facing ones. (In fact, it can't really do that without reorganizing the vertex buffers on the GPU for every frame, which would be a huge drag on render performance.)
The vertex layout for an SCNSphere has it set up like the lat/long grid on a globe: the triangles render in order along the meridians from 0° to 360°, so depending on how the sphere is oriented with respect to the camera, some of the faces on the far side of the sphere will render before the nearer ones.
To fix this, you need to force the rendering order — either directly, or through the depth buffer. Here's one way to do that, using a separate material for the inside surface to illustrate the difference.
// add two balls, one a child of the other
let node = SCNNode(geometry: SCNSphere(radius: 1))
let node2 = SCNNode(geometry: SCNSphere(radius: 1))
scene.rootNode.addChildNode(node)
node.addChildNode(node2)
// cull back-facing polygons on the first ball
// so we only see the outside
let mat1 = node.geometry!.firstMaterial!
mat1.cullMode = .Back
mat1.transparent.contents = bwCheckers
// my "bwCheckers" uses black for transparent, white for opaque
mat1.transparencyMode = .RGBZero
// cull front-facing polygons on the second ball
// so we only see the inside
let mat2 = node2.geometry!.firstMaterial!
mat2.cullMode = .Front
mat2.diffuse.contents = rgCheckers
// sphere normals face outward, so to make the inside respond
// to lighting, we need to invert them
let shader = "_geometry.normal *= -1.0;"
mat2.shaderModifiers = [SCNShaderModifierEntryPointGeometry: shader]
(The shader modifier bit at the end isn't required — it just makes the inside material get diffuse shading. You could just as well use a material property that doesn't involve normals or lighting, like emission, depending on the look you want.)
You can also do this using a single node with a double-sided material by disabling writesToDepthBuffer, but that could also lead to undesirable interactions with the rest of your scene content — you might also need to mess with renderingOrder in that case.
macOS 10.13 and iOS 11 added SCNTransparencyMode.dualLayer which as far as I can tell doesn't even require setting isDoubleSided to true (the documentation doesn't provide any information at all). So a simple solution that's working for me would be:
ballMaterial.diffuse.contents = UIImage(named: ballTexture)
ballMaterial.transparencyMode = .dualLayer
ballGeometry.materials = [ballMaterial]