Moments in Graphics
A blog by Christoph Peters

Moment Shadow Mapping

Christoph Peters, Reinhard Klein.
2015–02 in Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and Games. ACM.
Official version

Abstract

We present moment shadow mapping, a novel technique for fast, filtered hard shadows. Like variance shadow mapping it allows for the application of all kinds of efficient texture filtering and antialiasing to its moment shadow map. However it is designed to provide a substantially higher quality. Moment shadow maps store four moments of the depth within the filter kernel. Using this information, our efficient algorithm computes the sharpest possible lower bound as approximation to the shadow intensity. The choice to compute such a bound using four moments is based upon an automated evaluation of thousands of alternatives and thus known to be optimal. To reduce memory and bandwidth requirements we present an optimized quantization scheme to allow 16-bit quantization of moment shadow maps. Our evaluation demonstrates that moment shadow mapping produces high quality results with a single shadow map sample per fragment using 64 bits per shadow map texel.

Keywords: automated evaluation, filtered hard shadows, moment problem, shadow mapping, variance shadow mapping

Images

1_Teaser 2_SeaportCity 3_SeaportSquare 4_VSM 5_4MSM 6_MomentHull

Video

Errata

Two typos found their way into the official version:

For your convenience these mistakes are corrected in the author's version available here.

Downloads