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

Published: 27 February 2009 Publication History

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.

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

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      I3D '09: Proceedings of the 2009 symposium on Interactive 3D graphics and games
      February 2009
      253 pages
      ISBN:9781605584294
      DOI:10.1145/1507149
      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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      Published: 27 February 2009

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      Author Tags

      1. Larrabee
      2. real-time
      3. shadow mapping
      4. soft shadows

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      I3D '09: Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games
      February 27 - March 1, 2009
      Massachusetts, Boston

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      • (2016)4D-rasterization for fast soft shadow renderingProceedings of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering: Experimental Ideas & Implementations10.5555/3056507.3056511(13-21)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2016
      • (2015)Fast 4D Sheared Filtering for Interactive Rendering of Distribution EffectsACM Transactions on Graphics10.1145/281681435:1(1-13)Online publication date: 29-Dec-2015
      • (2014)GEARSComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1234833:6(264-275)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2014
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      • (2013)Boundary‐Aware Extinction MappingComputer Graphics Forum10.1111/cgf.1223832:7(305-314)Online publication date: 25-Nov-2013
      • (2013)Screen Space Anisotropic Blurred Soft Shadows by Efficient Separable Filtering MethodProceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Cyberworlds10.1109/CW.2013.75(124-131)Online publication date: 21-Oct-2013
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