Silhouette Extraction for Shadow Volumes Using Potentially Visible Sets

Silhouette Extraction, Octree, Compression, Shadow Volumes

In this paper we present a novel approach for accelerated silhouette computation based on potentially visible sets stored in the octree acceleration structure. Scene space, where the light source can appear, is subdivided into voxels.  The octree voxels contain two precomputed sets of edges that potentially or always belong to the silhouette. We also propose a novel method of octree compression for reduction of the memory footprint of the resulting acceleration structure. Using our novel technique we were able to considerably decrease the silhouette computational complexity and reduce its sensitivity to the number of edges.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for accelerated silhouette computation based on potentially visible setsstored in the octree acceleration structure. The scene space, where the light source can appear, is subdivided intovoxels. The octree voxels contain two precomputed sets of edges that potentially or always belong to the silhouette.We also propose a novel method of octree compression for reduction of the memory footprint of the resulting accel-eration structure. Using our novel technique we were able to considerably decrease the computational complexityof finding the silhouette and reduce its sensitivity to the number of edges.