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M. Stingl:
"Robust Hard Shadows";
Supervisor: M. Wimmer, D Scherzer; Institut für Computergraphik und Algorithmen, 2011.

The generation of shadows in large virtual environments for real-time rendering applications like e.g. video games is still a great challenge for computer graphics. In the past few years shadow mapping and its variants have become widely accepted as appropriate methods for shadow creation, which resulted in large number of advanced shadow mapping techniques that have been introduced recently. For this reason, it sometimes can be difficult for developers to choose a suitable method based on the certain given scenarios. This thesis focuses on an analysis of some common fully hardware-accelerated shadow mapping techniques and their capabilities to combine them with each other. We present an interactive framework that allows the user to experiment with the chosen methods and to visualize almost every interesting aspect of the shadow creation process for arbitrary scenes. It offers the opportunity to generate the shadows by using multiple shadow maps, sample redistribution or both and provides most possible flexibility in terms of various adjustable parameters. Furthermore, it includes a feature to analyze the final results from different points of view, which should help developers to find the best suited algorithm for the given scene.

http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_201396.pdf