Fast, Memory-Efficient Construction of Voxelized Shadows

Journal article, 2016

We present a fast and memory efficient algorithm for generating Compact Precomputed Voxelized Shadows. By performing much of the common sub-tree merging before identical nodes are ever created, we improve construction times by several orders of magnitude for large data structures, and require much less working memory. To further improve performance, we suggest two new algorithms with which the remaining common sub-trees can be merged. We also propose a new set of rules for resolving undefined regions, which significantly reduces the final memory footprint of the already heavily compressed data structure. Additionally, we examine the feasibility of using CPVS for many local lights and present two improvements to the original algorithm that allow us to handle hundreds of lights with high-quality, filtered shadows at real-time frame rates.