
1.3. Shadow Algorithms: Basic Ideas and Properties 11
e shadow depth map has been very successful in many graphics environ-
ments because
● e basic approach is simple to implement.
● It can handle surfaces other than polygons. See Chapter 3.
● It can be used as a sort of protocol of shadow information from dierent
geometry representations or dierent renderers.
● It can be used as a sort of protocol of shadow information to account for
shadows from dierent geometry layers (that are merged into one single
scene) [344].
● e performance can be quite fast without GPU assistance. Occlusion
culling algorithms [106, 201, 52] can also be applied so that