Volumetric Shadow Techniques Transparent objects will attenuate and change the color of light. For some sets of transparent objects, techniques similar to those discussed in Section 5.5 can be use...

Filtered Shadow Maps One algorithm that allows filtering of the shadow maps generated is Donnelly and Lauritzen’s variance shadow map (VSM) . The algorithm stores the depth in one map and the depth...

Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows In 2005 Fernando published an influential approach called percentage-closer soft shadows (PCSS). It attempts a solution by searching the nearby area on the shadow m...

Percentage-Closer Filtering A simple extension of the shadow-map technique can provide pseudo-soft shadows. This method can also help ameliorate resolution problems that cause shadows to look bloc...

Shadow Mapping A common z-buffer-based renderer could be used to generate shadows quickly on arbitrary objects. The idea is to render the scene, using the z-buffer, from the position of the light ...

Shadow Volumes Method Overview A method based on shadow volumes can cast shadows onto arbitrary objects by clever use of the stencil buffer. It can be used on any GPU, as the only requirement is a ...

Shadows on Curved Surfaces One simple way to extend the idea of planar shadows to curved surfaces is to use a generated shadow image as a projective texture. Think of shadows from the light’s poin...

This chapter focuses on the basic principles of computing shadows, and describes the most important and popular real-time algorithms for doing so. We also briefly discuss approaches that are less p...

Textured Lights Textures can also be used to add visual richness to light sources and allow for complex intensity distribution or spotlight functions. For lights that have all their illumination l...

Parallax Mapping A problem with bump and normal mapping is that the bumps never shift location with the view angle, nor ever block each other. It would be better to have the bumps actually affect ...