Packet-based Hierarchal Soft Shadow Mapping

International audienceRecent soft shadow mapping techniques based on back-projection can render high quality soft shadows in real time. However, real time high quality rendering of large penumbrae is still challenging, especially when multi-layer shadow maps are used to reduce single light sample silhouette artifact. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to attack this problem. We first present a GPU-friendly packet-based approach rendering a packet of neighboring pixels together to amortize the cost of computing visibility factors. Then, we propose a hierarchical technique to quickly locate the contour edges, further reducing the computation cost. At last, we suggest a multi-view shadow map approach to reduce the single light sample artifact. We also demonstrate its higher image quality and higher efficiency compared to the existing depth peeling approaches