Selective ray tracing for interactive high-quality shadows

We present novel algorithms to achieve interactive high-quality illumination with hard and soft shadows in complex models. Our approach combines the efficiency of rasterization-based approaches with the accuracy of a ray tracer. We use conservative image-space bounds to identify only a small subset of the pixels in the rasterized image and perform selective ray tracing on those pixels. The algorithm can handle moving light sources as well as dynamic scenes. In practice, our approach is able to generate high quality hard and soft shadows on complex models with millions of triangles at almost interactive rates on current high-end GPUs.