Shadow Volume Generation from Free Form Surfaces

The generation of shadows has occupied the computer graphics community for some time. Several approaches have been successfully developed, but many except ray tracing assume a polygonal approximation of the model. In this paper, an approach is presented that allows one to compute shadow volumes directly from free form models and exploit them for the generation of shadows using a Z-bu er based renderer. A polygonal approximation is not required for either the construction of the shadow volume or for the rendering process. Key Words: Computer graphics, shadows, shadow volumes, parametric surfaces.