Algorithms for antialiased cast shadows

Abstract The ability to render the shadows cast by objects in a scene is of prime importance in augmenting the realism of sequences produced by image synthesis algorithms. From a theoretical standpoint, the problem does not present a great number of difficulties: It requires an integration in the process, of the viewpoint from the light source and the utilization of this information when calculating the lighting of the pixels. The purpose of this study is not to present a radically new approach, but to explore in depth the most common problem present in these images, the aliasing, or more generally speaking, the sampling problem. This work has implied a specific approach in the hidden surface determination, the introduction of a variation of the already used A-buffers or Z-buffers, as well as an extensive study of the filtering problem.