High-Quality Shadows with Improved Paraboloid Mapping

This paper introduces a novel approach to rendering of highquality shadows in real-time. The contemporary approach to shadow rendering in real-time is shadow maps algorithm. The standard shadow maps suffer from discretization and aliasing due to the limited resolution of the shadow texture. Moreover, omnidirectional lights need additional treatment to work correctly, e.g. with dual-paraboloid shadow maps. We propose a new technique that significantly reduces the aliasing problem and works correctly for various kinds of light sources. Our technique adapts the light’s field-of-view to the visible part of the scene and thus stores only the relevant part of the scene to the full resolution of the shadow map. It produces high-quality shadows which are not constrained by position or type of the light sources and also works in fully dynamic scenes. The paper describes the new approach, presents some results, and discusses the potential and features of the approach.