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Soft shadow volumes for ray tracing

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Author

Summary, in English

We present a new, fast algorithm for rendering physically-based soft shadows in ray tracing-based renderers. Our method replaces the hundreds of shadow rays commonly used in stochastic ray tracers with a single shadow ray and a local reconstruction of the visibility function. Compared to tracing the shadow rays, our algorithm produces exactly the same image while executing one to two orders of magnitude faster in the test scenes used. Our first contribution is a two-stage method for quickly determining the silhouette edges that overlap an area light source, as seen from the point to be shaded. Secondly, we show that these partial silhouettes of occluders, along with a single shadow ray, are sufficient for reconstructing the visibility function between the point and the light source.

Publishing year

2005

Language

English

Pages

1156-1165

Publication/Series

ACM Transactions on Graphics

Volume

24

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)

Topic

  • Computer Science

Keywords

  • shadow algorithms
  • visibility determination

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 0730-0301