Improved Partitioned Shadow Volumes Method of Real-Time Rendering Using Balanced Trees

Abstract

Shadows are probably one of the most important factors of the 3D scene. They enhance realism and comprehension of rendered images. They are usually generated with some variation of shadow volumes or shadow mapping, although recently a new algorithm called Partitioned Shadow Volumes appeared. The paper presents an improved version of the Partitioned Shadow Volumes algorithm, dedicated for the static scenes, that optimizes the speed of shadowing by using binary space partitioning heuristics to generate more optimal ternary object partitioning tree. There is an obvious trade-off between ternary object partitioning tree building time and the rendering time, but the tests have shown that the proposed modification can significantly speed up the rendering time of scenes when the light position and shadow caster model do not frequently change.