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Introduction Shadows used to be just a patch of darkened texture, usually round in shape, which is projected onto the floor below characters or objects in a game. One must be ill informed or naïve to think that we can still get away with this kind of sloppy "hacks" in future 3D games. There used to be a time where shadows are just too expensive to be rendered properly in real-time, but with the ever-increasing power of graphics hardware, failure to provide proper shadows no longer meant mediocre implementations, it borders on being guilty of criminally under-utilizing the graphics hardware available. There are many differing shadowing techniques and approaches to implementing shadows and nailing down a "best" solution is difficult. In order to understand all the approaches and appreciate their differences, strengths and weakness, I strongly suggest reading anything and everything about doing shadows in 3D. We should not constrain ourselves to just studying shadow volume technique; any shadowing technique is worth a look. Chapter 6 of [13] has a wonderful high-level discussion on most of the known shadowing techniques. To limit the scope of this paper, we shall only discuss the theory and implementation issues of stencil shadow volumes with particular reference to using Microsoft's Direct3D API. It would also be good to understand that stencil shadow volume just isn't the "end all" shadowing technique. A discussion on the strengths of differing shadowing technique can be found at [4] with reference to a game setting. Just recently, Eric Lengyel [11] also presented a very complete article on implementing shadow volumes in OpenGL at the Gamasutra website [17]. The mathematical derivations of Lengyel's article can be found in [12]. Going back a few years, there was the famous "Carmack On Shadow Volumes" text file [6], which is nothing more that an email from John Carmack of id Software to Mark Kilgard of Nvidia about the derivation of the depth-fail shadow volume implementation. It's interesting to note that Carmack independently discovered the depth-fail method while Bill Bilodeau and Mike Songy [7] had also presented similar approach to shadow volumes. Consequently, the depth-fail method is now commonly known as "Carmack's Reverse". Stencil Shadow Volume Concept Frank Crow [8] first presented the idea of using shadow volumes for shadow casting in 1977. Tim Heidmann [5] of Silicon Graphics implemented Crow's shadow volume by cunningly utilizing the stencil buffer for shadow volume counting in IRIX GL. Lets take a look at how the original stencil shadow volume technique works. Figure 1: Occluder and shadow volume As common convention goes, any objects in a scene that cast shadows are called occluders. As shown in Figure 1 above, we have a simplistic 2D view (top down) of a scene with a sphere as the occluder. The rectangle to the right of the sphere is the shadow receiver. For simplicity, we do not take into account the shadow volume created by the rectangle. The shaded region represents the shadow volume, in 2D, created by the occluder. The shadow volume is the result of extruding the silhouette edges from the point-of-view of the light source to a finite or infinite distance. Figure 2: Silhouette of occluders Figure 2 shows the probable silhouette of the sphere generated from the viewing position of the light source. The silhouette is simply made up of edges that consist of two vertices each. These edges are then extruded in the direction as shown by the broken arrows originating from the light source. By extruding the silhouette edges, we are effectively creating the shadow volume. It should be noted at this point in time that shadow volume extrusion differs for different light sources. For point light sources, the silhouette edges extrude exactly point for point. For infinite directional light sources, the silhouette edges extrude to a single point. We will go into the details of determining silhouette edges and the creation of the shadow volumes later. The magnitude of the extrusion can be either finite or infinite. Thus, implementations that extrude silhouette edges to infinity are commonly known as Infinite Shadow Volumes. Figure 3: Depth-Pass stencil operation Figure 3 shows the numerous possible viewing direction of a player in the scene. The numbers at the end of the arrows are the values left in the stencil buffer after rendering the shadow volume. Fragments with non-zero stencil values are considered to be in shadow. The generation of the values in the stencil buffer is the result of the following stencil operations: Render front face of shadow volume. If depth test passes, increment stencil value, else does nothing. Disable draw to frame and depth buffer. Render back face of shadow volume. If depth test passes, decrement stencil value, else does nothing. Disable draw to frame and depth buffer. The above algorithm is also known as the Depth-Pass stencil shadow volume technique since we manipulate the stencil values only when depth test passes. Depth-pass is also commonly known as z-pass. Let's assume that we had already rendered the objects onto the frame buffer prior to the above stenciling operations. This means that the depth buffer would have been set with the correct values for depth testing or z-testing if you like. The 2 leftmost ray originating from the eye position does not hit any part of the shadow volume (in gray), hence the resultant stencil values is 0, which means that the fragment represented by this two rays are not in shadow. Now lets trace the 3rd ray from the left. When we render the front face of the shadow volume, the depth test would pass and the stencil value would be incremented to 1. When we render the back face of the shadow volume, the depth test would fail since the back face of the shadow volume is behind the occluder. Thus the stencil value for the fragment represented by this ray remains at 1. This means that the fragment is in shadow since its stencil value is non-zero. Does the shadow volume counting work for multiple shadow volumes? Yes it does. Figure 4: Multiple shadow volumes counting Figure 4 above shows that the counting using the stencil buffer will still work even for multiple intersecting shadow volumes. Finite Volume vs Infinite Volume Referring back to Figure 1, you could see that the shadow volume is supposed to extrude to infinity. This is actually not strictly a requirement. We send the shadow volume to infinity in order to avoid the awkward situation whereby the light source is very close to an occluder. Figure 5: Finite shadow volume fails to shadow other objects With the light close to object A, a finite shadow volume may not be enough to reach object B. The ray from the eye towards object B will end up with a fragment stencil value of 0 when in fact it should have been non-zero! An infinite shadow volume would ensure that no matter how close the object is to an occluder, the resultant shadow volume would cover all the objects in the scene. We will discuss how to extrude vertices to infinity shortly. Carmack's Reverse

Contents   Introduction   Carmack's Reverse   Putting It Together   Extruding Geometries To Infinity   Depth-Pass or Depth-Fail   Printable version   Discuss this article