[IMAGE -- hair with shadows]

Deep Shadow Maps

Reference: Tom Lokovic and Eric Veach, SIGGRAPH 2000 Proceedings (August 2000), Addison-Wesley.

Images too dark? Try the gamma corrected pages.
There is also more information on gamma correction.

Abstract

We introduce deep shadow maps, a technique that produces fast, high-quality shadows for primitives such as hair, fur, and smoke. Unlike traditional shadow maps, which store a single depth at each pixel, deep shadow maps store a representation of the fractional visibility through a pixel at all possible depths. Deep shadow maps have several advantages. First, they are prefiltered, which allows faster shadow lookups and much smaller memory footprints than regular shadow maps of similar quality. Second, they support shadows from partially transparent surfaces and volumetric objects such as fog. Third, they handle important cases of motion blur at no extra cost. The algorithm is simple to implement and can be added easily to existing renderers as an alternative to ordinary shadow maps.

Additional information

If the images are too dark, try the gamma corrected pages. All JPEG images were compressed using a quality setting of 90.
Return to other recent papers from Stanford

Last modified: June 20, 2000

Eric Veach