Shadow Volume Tutorial by Skaven

I was asked to write a tutorial about making shadows for ArmA and so I took the opportunity to paste it here, I know this as been explained before, however, this is a dedicated thread and will be easier for future searches.

1 - Open a 10000 distance view LOD (note it's 10000 not 10.000)

2 - Make the model to use as a shadow inside the 10000 LOD (for example a weapon should be like 200/300 polys tops, of course the less the better).

PS: Don't forget to delete the textures applied on the Shadows model (if you have any) since it's all black you don't need it mapped.

3 - Open a property inside your 10000 Lod and call it Lodnoshadow the value is 0

4 - Open the same property (Lodnoshadow) in all the other Lods but this time give it a value of 1.

5 - Inside the Shadow Lod (10000) with the entire model selected go to Structure/Topology/Find non-Closed and check if you have any opened point/faces (they get red if you do and below on your left O2 tells you the amount of them).

6 - If you do have any opened points/faces you must close them, you may try O2 to close them for you, for that go to Structure/Topology/Close, this should close the model for you, however, sometimes you need to do it by hand since this feature inside O2 as some limitations.

PS: Be sure that all points/faces are closed, the best way to know this is by doing the step I wrote you before Structure/Topology/Find non-Closed and see if it gives you 0/0 on the left part below, if you miss this than not only the shadows won't work as most of the times the game will crash while loading the model.

7 - Finnaly with all points/faces closed, select the entire model and go to Structure/Triangulate \

That's it, now try your shadow in game, good luck

Model needs to be closed, triangulated AND sharp edged

You can have more than 400 polies in the shadow LOD. I've expirmented with a 1000 poly model up to 4000 poly. It worked but with varying loading results. So it's best to keep it low to keep preformance up.

i found that shadows on vehicles works no matter if triangulated or not no matter LOD 30 or 10000 but on my weapons i get really stupid results i don't know why, but soemtimes my weapons (after close, triangulate, 10000) look like zebra so i decided not to give shadows, now i work on making jnew low-poly models for shadows, but what if shadow model is diffenent than LOD models ?
inner shadow can cause sick effects on weapons ?

i get best results when shadow lod was almost copy of pilot view why shadows behave different ?
i have my graphic options on LOW, maybe this ?
but i really get zebra effects

i gave no “lodnoshadow =1”, i gave LOD 10000 (as i was told)
i gave model with lower polycount as i it was in OFP maybe there should be more detailed model ?
all faces are closed, no “open” or “hole” faces and weapons look really reall sick than

half of gun is almost black on the soldiers there is “zebra” of shadow

Armored_Sheep (BIS dev): The LODNoShadow property is not necessary. This property is used in other lods to disable shadow projection on too complex meshes. Wiki page updated.