Improvements of Shadow Rendering

This thesis describes a set of incremental improvements of the shadow volume algorithm. First, a novel robust method of silhouette extraction is detailed, including implementation on several hardware platforms. This technique was later improved, simplified and the whole shadow volume algorithm ported to hardware tessellation. Next, a novel accelerated silhouette extraction algorithm was proposed, based on octree acceleration structure. Finally, the proposed methods were compared with the latest omni-directional techniques casting hard shadows.

shadows, shadow volumes, silhouette, tessellation, GPGPU, acceleration structures, octree, shadow maps, visibility, ray tracing, RTX