Interactive Animation of Soft Shadows

Shadows are of great importance to computer graphics, especially for interactive animation due to the visual cues which they provide. Most research in the field of dynamic shadowing has focussed on shadows from point light sources, since they are much easier to compute than those from area light sources. This means that such shadows have sharp boundaries, and so often appear to be unrealistic. We present an algorithm which enables the interactive animation of shadows due to area light sources which have been computed using discontinuity meshing. The results in this paper show that it can be used interactively, and more importantly that it has good scalability characteristics with more complex scenes. 1. Introduction Shadowing algorithms have long been of interest in computer animation. The first suggestions for locating shadows came from Appel [1] as an extension of his hidden line algorithms. The first algorithms which worked in object space, and so were viewpoint independent, were p..