Real-time shadows

Shadows do much of the work in video games, films and other computer-generated imagery. They add realism and give viewers useful visual cues about depth and position. Recent gains in both image quality and rendering speed have made convincing shadows that update in real time achievable.

This book examines the theory and practice behind real-time shadow techniques. It addresses hard shadows, soft shadows, volumetric shadows and semi-transparent shadows, starting with the fundamentals and moving into more advanced topics in shadow computation. Along the way it presents interactive methods and the practical details needed to implement them.

The authors compare a range of algorithms for generating real-time shadows and show where each one fits. They discuss the limitations and failure cases of these methods, their strengths and weaknesses, and how well they suit different applications. Source code, videos, tutorials and other material are available on the book's companion website, www.realtimeshadows.com.