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Real-Time Shadows 1st Edition
Important elements of games, movies, and other computer-generated content, shadows are crucial for enhancing realism and providing important visual cues. In recent years, there have been notable improvements in visual quality and speed, making high-quality realistic real-time shadows a reachable goal.
Real-Time Shadows is a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of real-time shadow techniques. It covers a large variety of different effects, including hard, soft, volumetric, and semi-transparent shadows.
The book explains the basics as well as many advanced aspects related to the domain of shadow computation. It presents interactive solutions and practical details on shadow computation. The authors compare various algorithms for creating real-time shadows and illustrate how they are used in different situations. They explore the limitations and failure cases, advantages and disadvantages, and suitability of the algorithms in several applications. Source code, videos, tutorials, and more are available on the book’s website www.realtimeshadows.com.
- ISBN-101568814380
- ISBN-13978-1568814384
- Edition1st
- PublisherA K Peters/CRC Press
- Publication dateJuly 27, 2011
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions8 x 1 x 9.5 inches
- Print length498 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
… features insights by four world-renowned experts on the topic. Advanced, college-level collections in computer graphics will find this offers game programmers a fine survey of shadowing methods that use different combinations of scenes, shapes, lighting and more for their effects. All of the approaches under one cover make this volume a top recommendation for game programmers and advanced computer graphics collections alike.
―Midwest Book Review, December 2011
Shadows are one of the most visually important effects in computer graphics. Far from being a solved problem, generating efficient and robust shadows is one of the most active research topics in real-time rendering. Fortunately, four of the world’s foremost experts in real-time shadows have come together to write this excellent book, covering everything from the basics of simple shadow mapping to the state-of-the-art research in GPU-enabled soft and hard shadow techniques. If you work in games or real-time graphics, you owe it to yourself to get this book.
―David Luebke, NVIDIA Research
Real-Time Shadows is a wonderful book about a very important topic in computer graphics, and I hope it will cast a long and soft-edged shadow on the real-time graphics industry. This way, future games can look even better, and I am certain that this book will also serve as inspiration for more advanced research.
―Tomas Akenine-Möller, Lund University and Intel Corporation
There is a multitude of shadowing methods distributed across a wide variety of books and papers, each capitalizing on different combinations of various scene configurations, shape representations, lighting effects, aliasing situations, and computational resources. This book does a great job of collecting all of these together into a single volume of concise algorithm descriptions to make it easier to find the right shadowing method and then implement it.
―John C. Hart, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and former editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Graphics
At first glance, shadows seem to be a solved problem, but with limited time budget in real-time games they’re not. There is a zoo of shadow rendering techniques in games, and finally here is a book that covers them all. The authors are among the most knowledgeable people I know on all kind of occlusion problems and guide us through the various quality and performance tradeoffs.
―Martin Mittring, Epic Games
About the Author
Elmar Eisemann, Michael Schwarz, Ulf Assarsson, Michael Wimmer
Product details
- Publisher : A K Peters/CRC Press; 1st edition (July 27, 2011)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 498 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1568814380
- ISBN-13 : 978-1568814384
- Item Weight : 2.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 8 x 1 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,689,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #269 in Rendering & Ray Tracing
- #1,600 in Computer Graphics
- #2,750 in Graphics & Multimedia Programming
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

Michael Wimmer received an M.Sc. in 1997 and a Ph.D. in 2001. Since 2008, he is an Associate Professor at the Vienna University of Technology. His most well-known research achievements are in the areas of shadow rendering, visibility, animation, and procedural modeling. His current research interests are real-time rendering and global illumination, computer games, real-time visualization of large (urban) environments, point-based rendering, and procedural modeling for cities. He has coauthored many papers in these fields, and was general chair of the Graphics Hardware 2006 conference, papers co-chair of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2008, and is associate editor of the Computers & Graphics journal.

Elmar Eisemann is a professor at the TU Delft heading the Computer Graphics and Visualization Group. Until 2012, he was an associate professor at Telecom ParisTech. Before, he was a senior scientist heading a research group in the Cluster of Excellence (Saarland University / MPI Informatik) until December 2009. He studied Computer Science (Ecole Normale Superieure Paris) and obtained a Master's (2004) and PhD. degree (2008) in Mathematics / Computer Science from Grenoble Universities. He worked at MIT (2003), UIUC (2006), and Adobe (Seattle - 2007, Boston - 2008).
He was local organizer of the Eurographics Symposium on Rendering (2010,2012), High Performance Graphics 2012, and received the Eurographics Young Researcher Award 2011.
His interests include real-time and perceptual rendering, alternative representations, shadow algorithms, global illumination, and GPU acceleration techniques.
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