Scalable Height Field Self-Shadowing

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Date
2010
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Abstract
We present a new method suitable for general purpose graphics processing units to render self-shadows on dynamic height fields under dynamic light environments in real-time. Visibility for each point in the height field is determined as the exact horizon for a set of azimuthal directions in time linear in height field size and the number of directions. The surface is shaded using the horizon information and a high-resolution light environment extracted on-line from a high dynamic range cube map, allowing for detailed extended shadows. The desired accuracy for any geometric content and lighting complexity can be matched by choosing a suitable number of azimuthal directions. Our method is able to represent arbitrary features of both high- and low-frequency, unifying hard and soft shadowing. We achieve 23 fps on 1024x1024 height fields with 64 azimuthal directions under a 256x64 environment lighting on an Nvidia GTX 280 GPU.
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@article{
10.1111:j.1467-8659.2009.01642.x
, journal = {Computer Graphics Forum}, title = {{
Scalable Height Field Self-Shadowing
}}, author = {
Timonen, Ville
and
Westerholm, Jan
}, year = {
2010
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association and Blackwell Publishing Ltd
}, ISSN = {
1467-8659
}, DOI = {
10.1111/j.1467-8659.2009.01642.x
} }
Citation