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suggestion for new algorithm for soft shadows

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startrekfan001:
i'm not a programmer so this probably makes no sense, however it might be of use.

It just occured to me that to create soft shadows, you might as well render out a hard shadow map, apply gaussian blur to it and then apply the soft map to the scene. this way you get soft shadows too. This method should work much faster as gaussian blur is quite a fast script.

did this make sense?  :D

startrekfan001:
okay the least thing you guys could do is reply. wether you think its bad or not. just post your toughts.

Steve:
Hey, startrekfan001!  I've been out of town with almost no web access.  Give me a break!

Image based shadow algorithms (which includes things like yout suggestion) don't look that good and can have some very noticable artifacts.  In some instances it would look fine but unless I get a lot more complicated that simply blurring a non-aa shadow there would be problems like dark smudges near the edges of something that was in front of a shadow, etc.

startrekfan001:
oh i wasnt talking to you steve, dont worry :) but i know there are lots of people around here who know their way around programming, i kinda expected some reply from them.
too bad it wont work this way. i didnt rly understand the dark smudges but i guess its right, since i got to hear the pro ;-) anyway, thanks for the reply :-)

Kyle:
could those smudges be avoided with some type of masking? like, by using the depth of field to make sure the shadow doesn't overlap things closer to the camera.

the idea doesn't sound like something that would work, I'm just throwing something out there.

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