Real-Time Shadows

Editorial Reviews Review … features insights by four world-renowned experts on the topic. Advanced, college-level collections in computer graphics will find this offers game programmers a fine survey of shadowing methods that use different combinations of scenes, shapes, lighting and more for their effects. All of the approaches under one cover make this volume a top recommendation for game programmers and advanced computer graphics collections alike.

—Midwest Book Review, December 2011
Shadows are one of the most visually important effects in computer graphics. Far from being a solved problem, generating efficient and robust shadows is one of the most active research topics in real-time rendering. Fortunately, four of the world’s foremost experts in real-time shadows have come together to write this excellent book, covering everything from the basics of simple shadow mapping to the state-of-the-art research in GPU-enabled soft and hard shadow techniques. If you work in games or real-time graphics, you owe it to yourself to get this book.

—David Luebke, NVIDIA Research

Real-Time Shadowsis a wonderful book about a very important topic in computer graphics, and I hope it will cast a long and soft-edged shadow on the real-time graphics industry. This way, future games can look even better, and I am certain that this book will also serve as inspiration for more advanced research.

—Tomas Akenine-Möller, Lund University and Intel Corporation

There is a multitude of shadowing methods distributed across a wide variety of books and papers, each capitalizing on different combinations of various scene configurations, shape representations, lighting effects, aliasing situations, and computational resources. This book does a great job of collecting all of these together into a single volume of concise algorithm descriptions to make it easier to find the right shadowing method and then implement it.

—John C. Hart, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and former editor-in-chief ofACM Transactions on Graphics

At first glance, shadows seem to be a solved problem, but with limited time budget in real-time games they’re not. There is a zoo of shadow rendering techniques in games, and finally here is a book that covers them all. The authors are among the most knowledgeable people I know on all kind of occlusion problems and guide us through the various quality and performance tradeoffs.

—Martin Mittring, Epic Games