Shadow caster culling for efficient shadow mapping

Abstract

We propose a novel method for efficient construction of shadow maps by culling shadow casters which do not contribute to visible shadows. The method uses a mask of potential shadow receivers to cull shadow casters using a hierarchical occlusion culling algorithm. We propose several variants of the receiver mask implementations with different culling efficiency and computational costs. For scenes with statically focused shadow maps we designed an efficient strategy to incrementally update the shadow map, which comes close to the rendering performance for unshadowed scenes. We show that our method achieves 3x-10x speedup for rendering large city like scenes and 1.5x-2x speedup for rendering an actual game scene.