Occlusion textures for plausible soft shadows

This paper presents a novel approach to obtain plausible soft shadows for complex dynamic scenes and a rectangular light source. We estimate the lights occlusion at each point of the scene using pre-filtered occlusion textures, which dynamically approximate the scene geometry. The algorithm is fast and its performance independent of the light’s size. Being image based, it is mostly independent of the scene. No a priori information is needed, in particular there is no caster and receiver separation, making the method appealing and easy to use.

@Article { ED08b,
  author       = "Eisemann, Elmar and Decoret, Xavier",
  title        = "Occlusion textures for plausible soft shadows",
  journal      = "Computer Graphics Forum",
  number       = "1",
  volume       = "27",
  pages        = "13--23",
  month        = "July",
  year         = "2008",
  keywords     = "shadow, plausible, GPU",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2008/ED08b"
}