Adaptive Volumetric Shadow Maps
Many people ask me what sorts of things I work on. Well, here’s one of them you can download and run on your own! This is a graphics and code sample that co-developed to show off not only a novel new kind of volumetric effect, but also a new extension on some of Intel’s new CPU graphics hardware.
This technique is called adaptive volumetric shadow maps. The base idea was developed by Marco Salvi who published a paper on it a little while back. However, this version has been substantially improved by the use of a new feature of Intel processors called PixelSync which allows one to do the volumetric shadowing effect with a constant-sized buffer and no depth slicing.
The effect allows for self-shadowing on any kind of transmissive, volumetric media – such as smoke or hair simulations.
You can download the sample, run it your own, and read more about it here:
http://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2013/03/27/adaptive-volumetric-shadow-maps