Soft irregular shadow mapping: fast, high-quality, and robust soft shadows

  • Authors:

  • Gregory S. Johnson;Warren A. Hunt;Allen Hux;William R. Mark;Christopher A. Burns;Stephen Junkins

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Texas at Austin and Intel Corporation;University of Texas at Austin and Intel Corporation;Intel Corporation;University of Texas at Austin and Intel Corporation;University of Texas at Austin and Intel Corporation;Intel Corporation

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2009 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We introduce a straightforward, robust, and efficient algorithm for rendering high-quality soft shadows in dynamic scenes. Each frame, points in the scene visible from the eye are inserted into a spatial acceleration structure. Shadow umbrae are computed by sampling the scene from the light at the image plane coordinates given by the stored points. Penumbrae are computed at the same set of points, per silhouette edge, in two steps. First, the set of points affected by a given edge is estimated from the expected light-view screen-space bounds of the corresponding penumbra. Second, the actual overlap between these points and the penumbra is computed analytically directly from the occluding geometry. The umbral and penumbral sources of occlusion are then combined to determine the degree of shadow at the eye-view pixel corresponding to each sample point. An implementation of this algorithm for the Larrabee architecture yields from 27 to 33 frames per second in simulation for scenes from a modern game, and produces significantly higher image quality than other recent methods in the real-time domain.