Speaker: Michael Schwärzler
We propose a novel way to efficiently calculate soft shadows in real-time applications by overcoming the high computational effort involved with the complex corresponding visibility estimation each frame: We exploit the temporal coherence prevalent in typical scene movement, making the estimation of a new shadow value only necessary whenever regions are newly disoccluded due to camera adjustment, or the shadow situation changes due to object movement. By extending the typical shadow mapping algorithm by an additional light-weight buffer for the tracking of dynamic scene objects, we can robustly and efficiently detect all screen space fragments that need to be updated, including not only the moving objects themselves, but also the soft shadows they cast.
By applying this strategy to the popular Percentage Closer Soft Shadow algorithm (PCSS), we double rendering performance in scenes with both static and dynamic objects - as prevalent in various 3D game levels - while maintaining the visual quality of the original approach.