Tutorials
From Theory To Practice: Advanced Shadow Mapping Techniques
Abstract
This tutorial aims to give you a practical introduction to advanced
shadow mapping techniques in both theory and practice. Although
tremendous advances have been made in graphics hardware during the past
decade, synthesizing realistic shadows is still very challenging in
real-time rendering. Since there is a vast number of shadow algorithms
this tutorial does not intend to address them all, instead, we focus on
image-based shadow techniques based on shadow mapping. A comprehensive
list of interesting topics in this area are introduced such as the
mechanism of aliasing errors, the bias issue, pre-filtering shadow maps,
optimized parallel-split shadow maps etc. For the implementations in
practice we will also present a few optimisations and issues to be aware
of.
Biography
Dr. Fan Zhang received his PhD from the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong,
in Sept
ember 2007. After that he joined into the core rendering team in Ubisoft Entertainment Ltd. (UK) as a graphics programmer until December
2008. Dr Zhang has published a list of technical papers in both academic
conferences/journals and industrial books including
ShaderX 7 (http://www.shaderx7.com) and
GPU Gems 3 (http://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems3).
The representative contribution from him is the Parallel-Split Shadow
Maps (PSSMs) algorithm which has been extensively used in real-time
shadow rendering. His main research interests include image-based
rendering especially shadow mapping, and novel rendering techniques for
real-time global illumination.