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Abstract:
Shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and provide important visual cues. In
recent years, many important contributions have been made both for hard shadows
and soft shadows. Often spurred by the tremendous increase of computational
power and capabilities of graphics hardware, much progress has been made
concerning visual quality and speed, making high-quality real-time shadows a
reachable goal. But with the growing wealth of available choices, it is
particularly difficult to pick the right solution and assess shortcomings.
Because currently there is no ultimate approach available, algorithms should be
selected in accordance to the context in which shadows are produced. The
possibilities range across a wide spectrum; from very approximate, but really
efficient to slower but accurate, adapted only to smaller or only to larger
sources, addressing directional lights or positional lights, or involving GPU-
or CPU-heavy computations.
This course tries to serve as a guide to better understand limitations and
failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms
for different application scenarios. We will focus on real-time to interactive
solutions but also discuss offline approaches if needed for a better
understanding.
