Game Rendering » Shadow Mapping

Screen Space Blurred Shadow Mapping

admin — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:44:54 +0000

This is probably the first technique one will think for creating soft shadows when doing shadow mapping. The shadows are rendered to a texture (in screen space) and this texture is then blurred (in screen space) and later applied to the screen. This is a very easy technique for getting soft shadows. The main drawbacks are shadow bleeding and the cost of the extra passes.

An article about it on gamedev.net:
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article2193.asp

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Percentage Closer Filtering for Shadow Mapping

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 15:08:46 +0000

This is a technique for making softer shadows when doing shadow mapping. It works by filtering the result of the depth comparison. So when comparing a depth, some depths around should also be compared and the result should be averaged. This will give a softer look on the shadow edges.

It can be implemented as simple as this in a the pixel shader:

float result;
result = shadow2DProj(shadowMap,texCoord+offset[0]);
result += shadow2DProj(shadowMap,texCoord+offset[1]);
result += shadow2DProj(shadowMap,texCoord+offset[2]);
result += shadow2DProj(shadowMap,texCoord+offset[3]);
result /= 4.0; // now result will hold the average shading

The samples are often either taken in a grid-based square around the original sample location or randomly scattered around it.

Optimization:

NVIDIA has built in hardware support for doing bilinear interpolation between four samples.

ATI has fetch4 which will fetch four texture samples at the same time.

The original paper for PCF:
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/ShadowMaps/paper.pdf

A technique that is similar (percentage-closer soft shadows)
http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/docs/shadow_PCSS.pdf

A paper including lot’s of shadow mapping information, including different ways to do PCF (the image in this article is borrowed from this presentation):
http://developer.amd.com/media/gpu_assets/Isidoro-ShadowMapping.pdf

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Basic Shadow Mapping

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 23:28:12 +0000

Shadow mapping works in that it checks if a point is visible from the light or not. If a point is visible from the light then it’s obviously not in shadow, otherwise it is. The basic shadow mapping algorithm can be described as short as this:

Render the scene from the lights view and store the depths as shadow map
Render the scene from the camera and compare the depths, if the current fragments depth is greater than the shadow depth then the fragment is in shadow

It’s the implementation of it that is hard.

The two big problem areas with shadow mapping:

Hard to select an appropriate bias (epsilon)
Hard to get rid of artifacts at shadow edges

Projective texturing ( the method used to transform the fragment depth to the light space (where the shadow map is) for comparision)
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/Projective_Texture_Mapping.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projective_texture_mapping

OpenGL fixed-function pipeline implementation of shadow mapping:
http://www.paulsprojects.net/tutorials/smt/smt.html

A GLSL implementation of shadow mapping (in one of the posts)
http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=316147

Another GLSL shadow mapping shader:
http://sombermoon.com/shadowmappingdoc.html

DirectX9 shadow mapping example with source
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb147372(VS.85).aspx

Nvidias implementation of shadow mapping with source for both OpenGL and DirectX.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/hwshadowmap_paper.html

Shadow mapping in XNA
http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series3/Shadow_mapping.php
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb975671.aspx

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Forward Shadow Mapping

admin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:26:20 +0000

This technique for shadow mapping does the reverse when comparing depths. Instead of the normal case of comparing depths in light space, this method suggest that the comparison should be done in eye space. This requires the depth buffer from the lights’ view and from the camera’s view at the time of the comparison. This method is probably most useful when doing deferred lightning.

Link to the paper “Forward Shadow Mapping”
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~zhangh/shadow.html

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