Part II. Shading, Lighting, and Shadows

Shading, Lighting, and Shadows

 

The subject of shading, lighting, and shadows is a broad one, which touches many areas of real-time 3D applications, from the low-level instructions that determine how a pixel is colored or a vertex is positioned, to the higher-level ideas that govern the content creation and art pipeline.

Each year, GPUs with more and more features and higher performance become available; much of that extra power and flexibility is poured into “solving” the problem of creating realistic shading, lighting, and shadows. But we are decidedly not there yet, and we may never be. Every current algorithm for real-time shadows, for ...

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