Implicit Sphere Shadow Maps

Particle data are commonly visualized by rendering a sphere for each particle. Since interactive rendering usually relies on fast local lighting, the spatial arrangement of the spheres is often very hard to perceive. That is, larger functional structures formed by the particles are not easily recognizable. Using global effects such as ambient occlusion or shadows adds important depth cues. In this work, we present Implicit Sphere Shadow Maps (ISSM), an application-tailored approach for large, dynamic particle data sets. This approach can be combined with state-of-the-art object-space ambient occlusion to further emphasize the spatial structure of molecules. We compare our technique against state-of-the-art methods for interactive rendering with respect to image quality and performance.