• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
• /
• v.29 no.5
• /
• pp.245-256
• /
• 2002

Shadows are important elements in producing a realistic image. Generation of exact shapes and positions of shadows is essential in rendering since it provides users with visual cues on the scene. It is also very important to be able to create soft shadows resulted from area light sources since they increase the visual realism drastically. In spite of their importance. the existing shadow generation algorithms still have some problems in producing realistic shadows in real-time. While image-based rendering techniques can often be effective1y applied to real-time shadow generation, such techniques usually demand so large memory space for storing preprocessed shadow maps. An effective compression method can help in reducing memory requirement, only at the additional decoding costs. In this paper, we propose a new image-barred shadow generation method based on image warping. With this method, it is possible to generate realistic shadows using only small sizes of pre-generated shadow maps, and is easy to extend to soft shadow generation. Our method will be efficiently used for generating realistic scenes in many real-time applications such as 3D games and virtual reality systems.