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SI3D
2006
ACM

Variance shadow maps

14 years 4 months ago
Variance shadow maps
Shadow maps are a widely used shadowing technique in real time graphics. One major drawback of their use is that they cannot be filtered in the same way as color textures, typically leading to severe aliasing. This paper introduces variance shadow maps, a new real time shadowing algorithm. Instead of storing a single depth value, we store the mean and mean squared of a distribution of depths, from which we can efficiently compute the variance over any filter region. Using the variance, we derive an upper bound on the fraction of a shaded fragment that is occluded. We show that this bound often provides a good approximation to the true occlusion, and can be used as an approximate value for rendering. Our algorithm is simple to implement on current graphics processors and solves the problem of shadow map aliasing with minimal additional storage and computation. CR Categories: I.3.7 [Computer Graphics]: ThreeDimensional Graphics and Realism—Color, shading, shadowing, and texture
William Donnelly, Andrew Lauritzen
Added 14 Jun 2010
Updated 14 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2006
Where SI3D
Authors William Donnelly, Andrew Lauritzen
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