Issue with shadows when upgrading to 5

Questions
1

Hello all!

I’m trying to upgrade a Babylon 4 project to 5. It works out of the box for the most part, except for an issue with shadows not generating. I’m relatively new to shaders, so I was wondering if it might be obvious to one of you why this code works in 4.2.1 Babylon.js Playground but https://playground.babylonjs.com/#TWD7EG#1 does not load shadows in latest.

When upgrading to 5, I did have to change two includes because it seems there were some name changes. #include<shadowMapVertexDeclaration> to #include<shadowMapVertexExtraDeclaration> and #include<shadowMapFragmentDeclaration> to #include<shadowMapFragmentExtraDeclaration>.

Is there an upgrade guide for shaders that I may have missed as well?

Thank you!

edit: had wrong playgrounds linked

2

I have an error in console:
babylon.js:16 WebGL: INVALID_VALUE: uniformBlockBinding: invalid uniform block index

which is a webgl2 api , only used in code twice:

.Babylon.js/thinEngine.ts at 491d5db27d279bdbc73e7169290237a057894ee2 · BabylonJS/Babylon.js · GitHub

not touched for 7 months
.Babylon.js/engine.uniformBuffer.ts at 491d5db27d279bdbc73e7169290237a057894ee2 · BabylonJS/Babylon.js · GitHub

switching to the webgl1 engine fixes the issue for me.

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3

You’re right, I am seeing that as well. It seems like the shader doesn’t change between 4.2.1 and 5, though, so is there some new configuration I would need to use webgl2?

5

I’m seeing the same issue on this playground https://playground.babylonjs.com/#IJH4VG#2 linked from the docs Shadows | Babylon.js Documentation

6

Thats a good find, I think it may likely be considered a bug. Probably helpful to know, is your project using the NME?

7

Yes we are using NME. Thanks for your help on this!

8

I don’t have an answer for the problem, but I have a feeling it may be something related to the changes to the shader store, the new material plugin system, and changes to nme. I did a general search on the docs, maybe some of the examples that come up on the right side could be helpful .Search page | Babylon.js Documentation ,

especially this one is using an NME snippet with BABYLON.CascadedShadowGenerator and BABYLON.ShadowGenerator

.https://playground.babylonjs.com/#PNQRY1#80

here are the docs on the new material plugin. I don’t think its required to manually upgrade or anything, but probably just generally useful to read sometime. It’s kind of hard to find without knowing it’s there.

9

Actually that was super helpful! I added these declarations

#include<__decl__sceneVertex>
#include<__decl__meshVertex>

removed this one

uniform mat4 viewProjection;

and it seems to be working: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#TWD7EG#2

1 Like
10
3 Likes
11

haha thank you :joy:

12

Yes, for optimization sake we are now using the mesh/scene ubos in the shadow generator code. Note that in your case you also need to remove the declaration of world which is coming from the vertex include.

[EDIT] The sample in the doc will be fixed by:

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13

Is there any documentation on what code #include<__decl__sceneVertex> maps to and how Babylon maps it?

14

I don’t think so, it’s a bit of an advanced usage. I think there are some posts in this forum about the include / decl syntax.