Dynamic Shadow Rendering with Shadow Volume Optimization.

The shadow volume is utilized extensively for real-time rendering applications which includes updating volumes and calculating silhouette edges. Existing shadow volume methods are CPU intensive and complex occluders result in poor rendering efficiency. In this paper, we propose a hash-culling shadow volume algorithm that uses hash-based acceleration for the silhouette edge determination which is the most time-consuming processing in the traditional shadow volume algorithm. Our proposed method uses a hash table to store silhouette edge index information and thus reduces the time taken for redundant edge detection. The method significantly reduces CPU usage and improves algorithm time efficiency. Furthermore, for low hardware-level systems, especially embedded systems, it is still difficult to render dynamic shadows due to their high demand on the fill-rate capacity of graphics hardware. Our method has low hardware requirements and is easy to implement on PCs and embedded systems with real-time rendering performance with visual-pleasing shadow effects.