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This is my first real experiment with shadow mapping in WebGL. I've always used shadow volumes in previous OpenGL work, but the real-time calculation and projection of silhouette edges in JavaScript seems unnecessarily onerous. Thus, I wanted to see how much of the process could be done on the GPU and whether this is a reasonably viable alternative for the kind of shadows I need.
At first I had some pretty horrible aliasing effects on surfaces with high incidence angles, but a bit of tweaking in the shader and I've been quite surprised at how good the results are, even without any filtering or bluring effects (which I'll try later).
If you want to see what I mean about aliasing effects, go to the 'Display Settings' popup and reduce the 'Surface Opacity' to near zero. Then set the date/time such that the Sun is quite close to the ground. You should then be able to see an amount of jaggedness at the leading edge of each shadow block. Normally this is completely hidden by the opacity of the building facades, but it does illustrate the problem.
The key to getting a good result was not relying solely on the depth mask for all surfaces in the model. By testing each normal in the fragment shader, you don't need to use the depth mask at all for any surfaces that face away from the light as you can assume that they are in shadow. This one tweak was enough to get rid of all sorts of visual glitches that occured when the light source was near grazing incidence on both horizontal and vertical surfaces.
You can interactively adjust the 3D view of the model using a mouse, pen or stylus, or by touch on a tablet or phone. You can also use the items in the 3D View Settings popup.
NOTE: You can use the Shift and Ctrl/Meta keys to adjust the increment of each scroll event or key press.
The Shift and Ctrl/Meta keys are used pretty extensively to modify interactive data entry. This applies to all increment buttons, scroll wheel motion, slider controls and input elements.
NOTE: You can use the scroll wheel to edit a data value when hovering over any slider, numeric input or even table rows that indicate their editibility.
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JSON Editor
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KnockoutJS v3.2.0
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Knockstrap v1.2.0
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http://faulknercs.github.io/Knockstrap/
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lightgl.js
Copyright © 2011 by Evan Wallace - https://github.com/evanw
https://github.com/evanw/lightgl.js/
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Leaflet Maps API v1.4.0
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https://leafletjs.com/
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