Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games, SIGGRAPH Courses 2010.

We introduce adaptive volumetric shadow maps (AVSM), a real-time shadow algorithm that supports high-quality shadowing from dynamic volumetric media such as hair and smoke. The key contribution of AVSM is the introduction of a streaming simplification algorithm that generates an accurate volumetric light attenuation function using a small fixed memory footprint. This compression strategy leads to high performance because the visibility data can remain in on-chip memory during simplification and can be efficiently sampled during rendering. We demonstrate that AVSM compression closely approximates the ground-truth correct solution and performs competitively to existing real-time rendering techniques while providing higher quality volumetric shadows.

Paper: Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2010 Page (email "marco.salvi at intel.com" for a pre-print of the paper).

Citation: Marco Salvi, Kiril Vidimce, Andrew Lauritzen, and Aaron Lefohn, Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps, In Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR 2010), vol. 29(4), pp. 1289-1296, June 2010.

Slides: Zipped PPT (6mb)
Code: avsm.zip (30 mb)
BibTeX: avsm.bib

Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of EGSR 2010), vol. 29(4), pp. 1289-1296, June 2010.