I love this effect in games like Assassins Creed, Stalker etc. Has anyone implemented it in Skyrim yet? Is it even possible with this game engine?

Assassin's Creed series is absolutely gorgeous in this regard, and is one part of its graphical prowess that I love.

Great idea, but I don't think this is possible until:

• Bethesda adds this to the game engine themselves. Unlikely, since they have lots of stuff to work on currently (Kinect, DLC, navmesh bug, adding more gamejam stuff, and the usual bugfixes for patches).
  
• Someone makes a mod like MGE that essentially 'hacks' the game engine and replaces parts of it with it's own implementation. This would require a through understanding of the creation engine, and SKSE being fully-developed. This kind of thing would take years.

It should be possible with the Creation Engine.. Bethesda already did some impressive graphical stuff with it in Skyrim (like dynamic shadows, enhanced particle effects, improved animations, depth of field) that I didn't believe a newer incarnation of the archaic gamebryo engine could ever do.

OBGE was pretty close of acheiving it through a hacked in shader. It was also done in Morrowind I think.
So yeah, it's definitely possible. But for modders it would take a long time to even be able to hack in anything at all. Making the cloud shader itself is also pretty hard I think, otherwise OBGE's version would have been finished I guess.

Oh well, pity about that. I know this is probably a really daft idea but how about slow moving, gigantic cloud sized invisible dragons that cast shadows as a way of getting a similar effect?

Those "dragons" would be too far away for the "camera" that renders the shadows. Not a chance.

That could be good

Interesting idea, but remember that the shadowing system of Skyrim is a huge CPU killer. Plus it has the curious problem in that larger shadow distance means blockier shadows. Using a shader would be best, but until SKSE is developed enough, such hacks would not be possible.

False. I've seen big hawk shadows and when I look up to think I'll see it above me, I don't. Instead it's higher in the sky and not even close to being directly above me.

Can't hack into Skyrim's graphics too well so no dice : (

The good news is that Bethesda finally hired a dedicated graphics programmer. Maybe their next game won't look several years out of date : )

They did? Who did they hire and when?

Yeah, that's what I observed - made me think that cloud shadows could, perhaps, be done the same way. Not sure that Skyrim's shadowing system is always such a hog - my system is hardly impressive yet I can wander round Solitude with several birds overhead all casting shadows with no appreciable fps loss (shadows on high). I agree a shader would be best but that's a long way off, unfortunately.

I thought about this back last year but never got round to trying it out in the game, so after reading your post I decided to give it a go. Only took me 15 mins to get cloud shadows all over the landscape using very simple 1 sided poly shapes that kinda resemble clouds. Placed these high in the sky with the normals facing skywards so the were invisible to the eye but still cast shadows, and boy does it work quite well. There is a frame rate hit but very minimal as far as I can tell. Im gonna animate the cloud polys either having them spin very slowly as they are huge in size, or have them ping-pong forwards and backwards to show cloud movement. It must be noted that if you want these cloud shadows everywhere and accurate to the weather, they will need to be scripted and spawned according to the current cloud cover. Pretty simple stuff..

I would like to know if its possible to change the opacity of the shadows that hit the ground as currently they are a little to dark because they are the same as all the other shadows in terms of darknes/brightness. Cloud shadows should be very diffuse in nature and not sharp edged..

Couple of pics outside Whiterun with shadow draw distance set to 10000. As you can see the edges are to sharp and shadows way to dark. If we can figure a way of diffusing the edges and lowering the opacity of the shadows independant of the other shadows to about 15%, animate them moving, they could look really good I think..

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/40/cloudshadows1.jpg/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/687/cloudshadows2.jpg/

Hey, looks promising! No idea how to change the shadow opacity unfortunately, and stuff like Realistic Lighting which likely most people use makes all shadows even darker.

...eh?

It's effectively a console game, all console games are out of date =(.

Looks very promising, but AFAIK there is no way to set the opacity of individual shadows or shadows cast by a specific mesh. Skyrim's shadowing system treats all shadows as the same and these kind of 'hard' shadows would overlap with the existing shadows completely.Also, there is the additional problem of the shadows disappearing at a distance (and if you try to increase that distance by setting fshadowdistance, it kills performance). So it seems like the only 'solution' is to wait for a graphics 'hack' for Skyrim, something like OBGE or MGE.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wordridden/281272447/sizes/o/in/photostream/ are http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46478000/jpg/_46478513_cloud_neotsoai766.jpg. The human eye adapts to the low light when you're under them. Ideally, that's what the HDR in this game would replicate.

Assuming the cloud-casting polygon can't be given an alpha/transparency layer, could it have a finely scalloped/shredded edge, so that the edge of its shadow is softer and weaker?

This looks like a great idea! Do transparent textures give shadows? What about half transparent textures. Guess it would have been done already if it were that easy to make the shadows not as hard.

FrozenAffairs -
Shadows are based on geometry, object's textures have nothing to do with this.