Cost-effective shadowing method using the ED-buffer on an adaptive light cube

Z

-buffer approach, which takes full advantage of the resources already provided in current graphics hardware. We employ a modified data structure on the light screen's Z-buffer, which dramatically increases the shadowing accuracy. This data structure, the ED-buffer, also simplifies the shadow testing calculations considerably, needing only a couple of fixed-point multiplications and additions per shadow test. This is ideal for hardware implementation. We also present a technique for optimizing the use of the fixed memory resource in order to maximize the accuracy of shadowing when the scene is projected from the lighting point of view on the six faces of a cube surrounding the light source.