4D-rasterization for Fast Soft Shadow Rendering

Abstract

This paper describes an algorithm for rendering soft shadows efficiently by generalizing conventional triangle projection and rasterization from 2D to 4D. The rectangular area light source is modeled with a point light source that translates with two degrees of freedom. This generalizes the projection of triangles and of output image samples, as seen from the light, to the locus of projections as the light translates. The generalized projections are rasterized to determine a conservative set of sample/triangle pairs, which are then examined to derive light occlusion masks for each sample. The algorithm is exact in the sense that each element of the occlusion mask of a sample is computed accurately by considering all potentially blocking triangles. The algorithm does not require any type of precomputation so it supports fully dynamic scenes. We have tested our algorithm on several scenes to render complex soft shadows accurately at interactive rates.