(L) [2006/02/23] [Phantom] [Cheap & accurate soft shadows paper] Wayback!Someone recommended this paper on DevMaster.net:
[LINK http://graphics.cs.lth.se/research/papers/soft2005/laine2005siggraph_paper.pdf]
Looks like a quite complicated technique, but you do get full-qualilty and physically correct soft shadows for area lights using only one shadow ray (that's not the whole story, but it's quite cheap anyway).
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(L) [2006/02/23] [Ho Ho] [Cheap & accurate soft shadows paper] Wayback!I red that paper a few weeks ago. It seems like a nice thing but I'm not sure if it works well for realtime ray tracing. The computation of shilouette edges seems quite expensive. On the other hand it is probably faster than bruteforce tracing hundreds of rays. Also they say inceasing the number of samples doesn't affect speed a lot (quadrupling sample count seemed to decrease overall speed by rougly 25-50% instead of 400%.
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In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
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