Translucent shadow maps

Abstract

Shadow maps are a very efficient means to add shadows to arbitrary scenes. In this paper, we introduce Translucent Shadow Maps, an extension to shadow maps which allows very efficient rendering of sub-surface scattering. Translucent Shadow Maps contain depth and incident light information. Sub-surface scattering is computed on-the-fly during rendering by filtering the shadow map neighborhood. This filtering is done efficiently using a hierarchical approach. We describe optimizations for an implementation of Translucent Shadow Maps on contemporary graphics hardware, that can render complex translucent objects with varying light and material properties in real-time.