Packet-based Hierarchal Soft Shadow Mapping

Recent soft shadow mapping techniques based on back-projection can render high quality soft shadows in real time. However, real time high quality rendering of large penumbrae is still challenging, especially when multilayer shadow maps are used to reduce single light sample silhouette artifact. In this paper, we present an efficient algorithm to attack this problem. We first present a GPU-friendly packet-based approach rendering a packet of neighboring pixels together to amortize the cost of computing visibility factors. Then, we propose a hierarchical technique to quickly locate the contour edges, further reducing the computation cost. At last, we suggest a multi-view shadow map approach to reduce the single light sample artifact. We also demonstrate its higher image quality and higher efficiency compared to the existing depth peeling approaches.