Deep Shadow Maps

Deep Shadow Maps

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

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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

PDF of full paper (790K)
Postscript of full paper (5538K)
Postscript of paper, with no images (637K)
Figure 1: Hair rendered with and without self-shadowing
- (a) With self-shadowing (JPEG, 147K)
- (b) Without self-shadowing (JPEG, 155K)
Figure 6: Demonstration of noise from various shadow methods
- (a) Ball with 50,000 hairs (JPEG, 84K)
- (b) 512x512 Normal shadow map (JPEG, 34K)
- (c) 4096x4096 Normal shadow map (JPEG, 28K)
- (d) 512x512 Deep shadow map (JPEG, 28K)
Figure 10: Cloud rendered with and without self-shadowing
- (a) With self-shadowing (JPEG, 27K)
- (b) Without self-shadowing (JPEG, 25K)
Figure 11: A cloud with pipes (JPEG, 150K)
- Notice the shadows cast from surfaces onto volumetric objects and vice versa. A single deep shadow map contains the shadow information for the cloud as well as the pipes.
Figure 12: Rapidly moving sphere with and without motion blur
- (a) With self-shadowing (JPEG, 14K)
- (b) Without self-shadowing (JPEG, 14K)

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Last modified: June 20, 2000

Eric Veach