Real-Time Shadows

Elmar Eisemann, Michael Schwarz, Ulf Assarsson, Michael Wimmer

… features insights by four world-renowned experts on the topic. Advanced, college-level collections in computer graphics will find this offers game programmers a fine survey of shadowing methods that use different combinations of scenes, shapes, lighting and more for their effects. All of the approaches under one cover make this volume a top recommendation for game programmers and advanced computer graphics collections alike.—Midwest Book Review, December 2011Shadows are one of the most visually important effects in computer graphics. Far from being a solved problem, generating efficient and robust shadows is one of the most active research topics in real-time rendering. Fortunately, four of the world’s foremost experts in real-time shadows have come together to write this excellent book, covering everything from the basics of simple shadow mapping to the state-of-the-art research in GPU-enabled soft and hard shadow techniques. If you work in games or real-time graphics, you owe it to yourself to get this book.—David Luebke, NVIDIA ResearchReal-Time Shadows is a wonderful book about a very important topic in computer graphics, and I hope it will cast a long and soft-edged shadow on the real-time graphics industry. This way, future games can look even better, and I am certain that this book will also serve as inspiration for more advanced research.—Tomas Akenine-Möller, Lund University and Intel CorporationThere is a multitude of shadowing methods distributed across a wide variety of books and papers, each capitalizing on different combinations of various scene configurations, shape representations, lighting effects, aliasing situations, and computational resources. This book does a great job of collecting all of these together into a single volume of concise algorithm descriptions to make it easier to find the right shadowing method and then implement it.—John C. Hart, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and former editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on GraphicsAt first glance, shadows seem to be a solved problem, but with limited time budget in real-time games they’re not. There is a zoo of shadow rendering techniques in games, and finally here is a book that covers them all. The authors are among the most knowledgeable people I know on all kind of occlusion problems and guide us through the various quality and performance tradeoffs.—Martin Mittring, Epic Games

• Introduction. Basic Shadow Techniques. Shadow Map Aliasing. Shadow Map Sampling. Filtered Hard Shadows. Image-Based Soft Shadow Methods. Geometry-Based Soft Shadow Methods. Image-Based Transparency. Volumetric Shadows. Advanced Shadow Topics. Conclusion. Appendices. Bibliography.