High-Quality Shadows for Streaming Terrain Rendering

Matthäus G. Chajdas¹, Florian Reichl¹, Christian Dick¹, Rüdiger Westermann¹

¹Technische Universität München

Abstract

Rendering of large, detailed 3D terrains on commodity hardware has become possible through the use of ray-casting, data caching and prefetching. Adding dynamic shadows as they appear during a day-night cycle remains a challenge however, because shadow rendering requires access to the entire terrain, invalidating data streaming strategies. In this work we present a novel, practicable shadow rendering approach which distinguishes between near- and precomputed far-shadows to significantly reduce data access and runtime costs. While near-shadows are ray-traced using the current cache content, far-shadows are precomputed and stored in a very compact format requiring approximately 3 bit per height-map sample for an entire day-night cycle.

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Bibtex

@InProceedings{Chajdas:2015:TerrainShadows,
  author =       {Matth{\"{a}}us G. Chajdas and Florian Reichl and Christian Dick and R{\"{u}}diger Westermann},
  title =        {High-Quality Shadows for Streaming Terrain Rendering},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of Eurographics 2015 - Short Papers},
  pages =        {57--60},
  year =         {2015},
}