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Precomputed shadow fields for dynamic scenes

Published: 01 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We present a soft shadow technique for dynamic scenes with moving objects under the combined illumination of moving local light sources and dynamic environment maps. The main idea of our technique is to precompute for each scene entity a shadow field that describes the shadowing effects of the entity at points around it. The shadow field for a light source, called a source radiance field (SRF), records radiance from an illuminant as cube maps at sampled points in its surrounding space. For an occluder, an object occlusion field (OOF) conversely represents in a similar manner the occlusion of radiance by an object. A fundamental difference between shadow fields and previous shadow computation concepts is that shadow fields can be precomputed independent of scene configuration. This is critical for dynamic scenes because, at any given instant, the shadow information at any receiver point can be rapidly computed as a simple combination of SRFs and OOFs according to the current scene configuration. Applications that particularly benefit from this technique include large dynamic scenes in which many instances of an entity can share a single shadow field. Our technique enables low-frequency shadowing effects in dynamic scenes in real-time and all-frequency shadows at interactive rates.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 24, Issue 3
July 2005
826 pages
ISSN:0730-0301
EISSN:1557-7368
DOI:10.1145/1073204
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 July 2005
Published in TOG Volume 24, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. area lighting
  2. environment lighting
  3. precomputed source radiance
  4. precomputed visibility
  5. soft shadow
  6. video texture lighting

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  • (2024)Temporal vectorized visibility for direct illumination of animated modelsComputational Visual Media10.1007/s41095-023-0339-310:6(1045-1062)Online publication date: 29-May-2024
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