Something Interesting About the Sun Shadows in Skyrim

• Posted by Jay October 27, 2011 - 894 views

  I'm a digital artist and I tend to find these kinds of things interesting, maybe you will, too:

  I was watching this video on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fwfRZTSiFGE

  At 3:45 (the chicken-resurrection scene) if you look at the shadow on the bottom of the pillar, on the right of the screen, you'll notice that the shadow suddenly rises up the base of the pillar as the sun jumps down in the sky, then stops.

  I can't recall how sun/ time of day shadows were done in Oblivion or Fallout 3, but in Skyrim it seems as though they opted for small jumps in the sun's position.

  The only reason I can think of for doing this is to minimize "shadow crawl".  For instance, if you stand still in some games the low-res shadows will move across the screen, adding a bunch of ugly visual noise. 

  For low-resolution shadows on the Xbox or Playstation I can understand, but I wonder how this will be handled on the PC where shadow crawl is generally minimized into obscurity due to higher resolutions and picture fidelity.