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Carmack's Reverse Why did John Carmack, Bill Bilodeau and Mike Songy even bother to crack their heads to come out with an alternative stencil algorithm since the depth-pass technique seems to work great? Depth-pass really works well, at least most of the time. But when the eye point enters the shadow volume, all hell break loose. Figure 6: When eye point is within the shadow volume, depth-pass stencil operation fails As shown in Figure 6 above, the depth-pass technique utterly fails when the eye point is within the shadow volume. This meant that we could not have that big bad horned reaper sneaking up from behind you while engulfing you in the enlarging darkness of his shadows. John Carmack would never have it this way! The following is the depth-fail (a.k.a Carmack's Reverse) algorithm: Render back face of shadow volume. If depth test fails, increment stencil value, else does nothing. Disable draw to frame and depth buffer. Render front face of shadow volume. If depth test fails, decrement stencil value, else does nothing. Disable draw to frame and depth buffer. Figure 7: Depth-fail works even if eye point is in shadow Depth-fail is also commonly referred to as z-fail. Figure 7 shows the depth-fail technique working even when the eye point is in shadow. If you think about the scenario where the eye position is outside the shadow volume, the depth-fail technique should work as well. But really, it fails in some cases. We shall discuss these scenarios soon; just remember for now that both the depth-pass and depth-fail techniques are not perfect. In fact, we would need a combination of different methods to come up with a robust solution for shadow volumes. [11] and [10] contains some very good discussion on robust stencil shadow volume solutions. Capping For Depth-Fail To put in non-zero values into the stencil buffer, the depth-fail technique depends on the failure to render the shadow volume's back faces with respect to the eye position. This meant that the shadow volume must be a closed volume; the shadow volume must be capped at both the front and back end (even if back end is at infinity). Without capping, the depth-fail technique would produce erroneous results. Amazing as it may sound, but yes, you can cap the shadow volume even at infinity. Figure 8: Capping for shadow volume As shown in Figure 8, the front and back cap (bold lines) creates a closed shadow volume. Both the front and back caps are considered back face from the two eye positions. With depth-fail stenciling operations, the capping will create correct non-zero stencil values. There are a few ways to create the front and back capping. Mark Kilgard [2] described a non-trivial method of creating the front cap. The method basically involves the projection of the occluder's back facing geometries onto the near clip plane and uses these geometries as the front cap. Alternatively, we can build the front cap by reusing the front facing triangles with respect to the light source. The geometries used in the front cap can then be extruded, with their ordering reversed, to create the back cap. Reversing the ordering is to ensure that the back cap face outward from the shadow volume. In fact, we must always ensure that the primitives, in our case triangles, that define the entire shadow volume are outward facing as shown in Figure 9. It must be noted that rendering closed shadow volumes are somewhat more expensive than using depth-pass without shadow volume capping. Besides a larger primitive count for the shadow volume, additional computational resource are also needed to compute the front and back capping. We will go into the details of capping shadow volumes shortly. Figure 9: Shadow volume must be outward facing Putting It Together

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