Efficient Virtual Shadow Maps for Many Lights

Paper in proceeding, 2014

Recently, several algorithms have been introduced that enable realtime performance for many lights in applications such as games. In this paper, we explore the use of hardware-supported virtual cubemap shadows to efficiently implement high-quality shadows from hundreds of light sources in real time and within a bounded memory footprint. In addition, we explore the utility of ray tracing for shadows from many lights and present a hybrid algorithm combining ray tracing with cube maps to exploit their respective strengths. Our solution supports real-time performance with hundreds of lights in fully dynamic high-detail scenes.