13.4. Summary

There are a number of techniques for generating shadows, and this chapter described several that particularly lend themselves to real-time usage. Ambient occlusion is a technique that complements the global illumination techniques described in Chapter 12 by adding soft shadows that would naturally appear in the corners and crevices of objects in a scene. Shadow mapping is a technique that is well suited to implementation with OpenGL shaders on today's graphics hardware. A number of variations to shadow mapping can be used to improve its quality. We looked at a couple of methods that produce antialiased shadow edges. Finally, we also looked at a method that uses a deferred shading approach to render shadow volumes in order to produce soft shadows.