Generation of Stencil Shadow Volumes: Avant-garde Approaches

Earlier, hardware-accelerated stenciled shadow volume (SSV) techniques had not been widely adopted by 3D games and applications due in large part to the lack of robustness of described techniques. This situation persisted despite widely available hardware support. Since perception being changed, our aims are at providing an exhaustive study. In particular we discuss the advantages, limitations, rendering quality and cost of each algorithm. Stencil shadow volumes (SSVs) are still popular for their simplicity, adaptability to different approaches, hybrid nature, robustness, being powered by graphic hardware compatibilities and real time physical based rendering capabilities, making it highly demanding in graphics and gaming industries. We also addressed the rendering quality and cost of recent algorithms. Finally, we indicate that recent methods can be efficiently exploited and, with such a drastic improvement, how to make the physical based method more practically adopted methods for 3D games and in animation industries discussing optimizations, workflow, and scene management employed in commercial 3D engines