Beyond hard shadows: moment shadow maps for single scattering, soft shadows and translucent occluders

Abstract

Building upon previous works, we transfer the recently proposed moment shadow mapping to three new applications. Like variance shadow maps and convolution shadow maps, moment shadow maps can be filtered directly. Classically, this is used to filter hard shadows but previous works explore other applications. Prefiltered single scattering uses convolution shadow maps to render single scattering in homogenous participating media, variance soft shadow mapping uses variance shadow maps for approximate soft shadows and Fourier opacity mapping uses convolution shadow maps for translucent occluders. We combine these three techniques with moment shadow mapping to arrive at better heuristics with less computational overhead.