High Quality Shadows for Real-time Surface Visualization

This thesis describes the implementation of a shadowing system able to produce hard shadows. Shadow mapping is the most common real-time shadowing algorithm but it suffers from severe aliasing artifacts and self-shadowing effects. Different advanced techniques based on Shadow Mapping are implemented in this thesis with the objective of creating accurate hard shadows. First, an implementation based on Cascaded Shadow Maps is presented. This technique improves the visual quality of shadow mapping by using multiple smaller shadow maps instead of a large one. The technique addresses the fact that objects near the viewer require a higher shadow map resolution than objects far away. The second technique presented is Sub-pixel Shadow Mapping. By storing information about occluding triangles in the shadow map this technique is able to produce accurate hard shadows with sub-pixel precision. Both methods can be combined in order to improve the resulting shadow quality. Finally, a collection of advanced biasing techniques that minimize the self-hadowing artifacts generated by shadow mapping are presented. The final implementation achieves real-time performances with considerably improved quality compared to standard shadow mapping