Light Prepass Shadow Mapping

Ok, update on my Light Prepass journey. Shadow mapping is actually new to me, let alone ever using it in a deferred rendering. In fact this my first time to probably nail this thing to its head. Currently, its a simple shadow mapping... no magic.. no fancy footwork. The image you see here has a point light(w/ attenuation) casting shadow with 5x5 PCF (percent closer filtering). At this point, its all raw-brute-coding, definitely screaming for optimization. And obviously, I'm hiding all the shadow errors with a neat camera angle.

The model rendering however exhibits sound optimation. I've managed to remove all matrix computation in the pixel shader on the light passes (full screen quad and light convex mesh - I call these guys 'light blobs'). The mathematics here was such a nose bleed. The key here is making View Space your battle ground. Good thing the graphics gurus are around... MJP, Drilian, Engel, etc. Here's the link.

In terms of prepass packing, specifically the normals, the Cryengine 3 suggestion seem to produce some inaccuracies when I error check it with the fresh untouch normals. I added a weird value just to remove the error. Here's the code.

float4 PackDepthNormal(in float z, in float3 normal)
{
float4 output; normal = normalize(normal);
normal.x *= 1.000000000000001f; //<--- my nasty mod
output.xy = normalize(normal.xy) * sqrt(normal.z * .5f + .5f);
return PackDepth(output, z);
}

Anyway, I need to investigate this further. I find Pat Wilson's idea on converting normals to spherical coord better. I haven't profiled this but this seem to be a more optimized approach.

Back to shadows, my target is to use Cascaded Shadow Maps. Hopefully, in a few days time I can post the results.