Anti-aliasing and Continuity with Trapezoidal Shadow Maps

This paper proposes a new shadow map technique termed trapezoidal shadow maps to calculate high quality shadows in real-time applications. To address the resolution problem of the standard shadow map approach, our technique approximates the eye’s frustum as seen from the light with a trapezoid to warp it onto a shadow map. Such a trapezoidal approximation, which may first seem straightforward, is carefully designed to achieve the goal of good shadow quality for objects from near to far, and to address the continuity problem that is found in all existing shadow map approaches. The continuity problem occurs mainly when the shadow map quality changes significantly from frame to frame due to the motion of the eye or the light. This results in flickering of shadows. On the whole, our proposed approach is simple to implement without using complex data structures and it maps well to graphics hardware as shown in our experiments with large virtual scenes of hundreds of thousands to over a million of triangles.