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In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Courses

Efficient real-time shadows

Elmar Eisemann, Ulf Assarsson, Michael Schwarz, Michal Valient, and Michael Wimmer

Standard 4,0962 shadow map with perspective warping, rendering at 64 FPS (left). QVSM with a maximum refinement level of 32 × 32 and 1,0242 tiles, rendering at 32 FPS (right). Adaptive subdivision effectively removes aliasing in cases that are difficult for reparametrization and global partitioning methods.

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Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal. Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows. The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book's website www.realtimeshadows.com.

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Citation

Elmar Eisemann, Ulf Assarsson, Michael Schwarz, Michal Valient, and Michael Wimmer, Efficient real-time shadows, In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Courses, pp. 18:1–18:53, 2012.

BibTex 

@inproceedings{bib:eisemann:2012,
    author       = { Eisemann, Elmar and Assarsson, Ulf and Schwarz, Michael and Valient, Michal  and Wimmer, Michael },    
    title        = { Efficient real-time shadows },
    booktitle    = { In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH Courses },
    year         = { 2012 },
    pages        = { 18:1--18:53 },
    doi          = { 10.1145/2343483.2343500 },
    dblp         = { conf/siggraph/EisemannA0VW12 },
    url          = { https://publications.graphics.tudelft.nl/papers/287 },
}