Skip to main content

An Efficient Method for Rendering Detailed Soft Shadow

  • Conference paper
  • 2755 Accesses

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3942))

Abstract

In this paper, a new method is described for rendering convincing soft shadows from area light source at interactive frame rates. The method is based on the shadow map algorithm and it fully exploits the parallelism of the programmable graphics pipeline. In the method we sample the area light source using parallel linear segments and compute the light contribution of each segment using a completely new method which gives reasonable simulation for soft shadow generated by tiny scene object. We demonstrate that it can generate detailed soft shadow, while achieving the high frame rates. And our approach offers a number of benefits. E.g., it’s easy to be adopted by the projects using shadowing map and there is no extra overhead while the complexity of the scene geometry increases.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   149.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Williams, L.: Casting curved shadows on curved surfaces. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 270–274. ACM Press, New York (1978)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Woo, A., Poulin, P., Fournier, A.: A Survey of Shadow Algorithms. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications 10(6), 13–32 (1990)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Hasenfratz, J.-M., Lapierre, M., Holzschuch, N., Sillion, F.: A Survey of Real-Time Soft Shadows Algorithms. Computer Graphics Forum 22(4), 753–774 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Laine, S., Aila, T., Assarsson, U., Lehtinen, J., Akenine-Möller, T.: Soft Shadow Volumes for Ray Tracing. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 2005 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Lokovic, T., Veach, E.: Deep shadow maps. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 385–392. ACM Press, New York (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Gibson, S., Cook, J., Howard, T., Hubbold, R.: Rapid shadow generation in real-world lighting environments. In: Proceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Agrawala, M., Ramamoorthi, R., Heirich, A., Moll, L.: Efficient image-based methods for rendering soft shadows. In: Computer Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2000), ACM SIGGRAPH. Annual Conference Series, pp. 375–384 (2000) 9, 10, 16, 17

    Google Scholar 

  8. Soler, C., Sillion, F.X.: Fast Calculation of Soft Shadow Textures Using Convolution. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH 1998, pp. 321–332. ACM Press, New York (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Parker, S., Shirley, P., Smits, B.: Single sample soft shadows. Technical Report UUCS-98-019, Computer Science Department, University of Utah (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Chan, E., Durand, F.: Rendering Fake Soft Shadows with Smoothies. In: Proceedings of Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2003 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Heidrich, W., Brabec, S., Seidel, H.: Soft Shadow Maps for Linear Lights. In: Proc. Eurographics Workshop on Rendering 2000. Sringer (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Ying, Z., Tang, M., Dong, J.: Soft Shadow Maps for Area Light by Area Approximation. In: Proceedings of the 10th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Akenine-Möller, T., Assarsson, U.: Rapid Soft Shadows on Arbitrary Surfaces using Penumbra Wedges. In: Eurographics Workshop on Rendering 2002, pp. 309–318 (June 2002)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Sen, P., Cammarano, M., Hanrahan, P.: Shadow Silhouette Maps. In: SIGGRAPH 2003 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Reeves, W.T., Salesin, D.H., Cook, R.L.: Rendering Antialiased Shadows with Depth Maps. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH, pp. 283–291. ACM Press, New York (1987)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Mark, W.R., Glanville, R.S., Akeley, K., Kilgard, M.J.: Cg: A system for programming graphics hardware in a C-like language. In: Proceedings of ACM SIGGRAPH. ACM Press, New York (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  17. McCool, M.D.: Shadow volume reconstruction from depth maps. ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) 19(1), 1–26 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Zhou, F., Wang, G., Wang, H. (2006). An Efficient Method for Rendering Detailed Soft Shadow. In: Pan, Z., Aylett, R., Diener, H., Jin, X., Göbel, S., Li, L. (eds) Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment. Edutainment 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3942. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11736639_109

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11736639_109

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33423-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33424-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics