Chapter 17. Efficient Soft-Edged Shadows Using Pixel Shader Branching
Yury UralskyNVIDIA Corporation
Rendering realistic shadows has always been a hard problem in computer graphics. Soft shadows present an even greater challenge to developers, even when real-time performance is not required. Yet shadows are important visual clues that help us to establish spatial relationships between objects in a scene. In the past, artists understood the importance of shadows and used them to their advantage to emphasize certain objects and add depth to their pictures.
Real-world shadows always appear to have a certain amount of blurriness across their edges, and never appear strictly hard. Even on a bright, sunny day, when shadows are the sharpest, this is a ...
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