Real-time Shadow Generation for 3D simulations using modern hardware

Shadows are important to create realism in 3D Simulations. They give extra information about spatial relationships of objects and they add to the overal atmosphere. Several techniques to create shadows exist, each with their advantages and disadvantages. Modern graphics hardware can process more graphics data than every in real time. Shadow algorithms that required preprocessing or could not be used in real-time now be implemented efficiently using the modern GPUs. With the new geometry shader, processing of polygons can be moved from the CPU to the GPU. In this thesis real-time shadow generation using the Re-lion Renderer2 engine is presented. Several existing techniques have been adapted to make use of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware. These techniques have been implemented in a demo framework in the form of a shader library. To compare the performance and quality of the techniques, they were evaluated and compared in the areas of performance, shadow quality and memory usage. Finally, recommendations are made to select the right shadow technique for the right situation.