Soft shadows for cinematic lighting for computer graphics

1. A computer enabled method of animation, comprising the acts of:

providing an image depicting at least one object;

storing in a computer readable memory a plurality of depth values of each pixel of the image from a position of a light source, thereby forming a multilayer depth map;

storing in the computer memory an opacity or translucency value along with each of the plurality of depth values of each pixel in the multilayer depth map, thereby forming a multilayer translucent shadow map;

tracing a projected light ray against multilayer translucent shadow map;

performing an intersection test of each traced light ray to define at least one shadow in the image, as cast by the light ray;

wherein for each pixel there is provided a list of the layers of the multilayer depth map, each layer having a depth of the first samples in the layer, an accumulated opacity of all the samples in the layer, and a count of samples in the layer;

wherein the intersection test includes computing in a processor an accumulated visibility along each of the traced light rays using the multilayer translucent shadow map.

2. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the acts of sampling and filtering the shadow map thereby to compute a shadow effect of the light source.

3. The method of claim 1 , wherein the act of storing comprises:

providing a scan line renderer; and

in the scan line renderer, providing a list of a plurality of samples for each pixel representing the depth values of all objects that cover that pixel.

4. The method of claim 3 , further comprising the act of inserting a sample into the pixel list of the shadow map when an object covering that pixel is rasterized.

5. The method of claim 1 , wherein the act of performing the intersection test further comprises:

transforming the light ray to a ray in camera space of the shadow map;

clipping the camera space ray;

projecting the clipped camera space ray to a screen space of the image; and

ray tracing the resulting screen space ray against the multilayer translucent shadow map.

6. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the acts of:

projecting a light ray to each pixel of the image;

determining a position of surfaces or volume samples intersected by the projected light ray for each pixel; and

determining visibility changes of the projected light ray due to the intersection.

7. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the acts of:

storing a number of samples between each pair of the selected points; and when the accumulated opacity is 1, resetting it to a value of zero.

8. The method of claim 1 , wherein the projected light rays emanate from an area light source.

9. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the act of:

moving a camera location of the shadow map away from a center of the light source, along a reverse direction of the light; whereby the objects in the image are not clipped by the projected light ray.

10. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the act of:

providing at least four of the layers.

11. A non-transitory computer readable medium storing computer code for carrying out the method of claim 1 .

12. A programmed computer, programmed to carry out the method of claim 1 .

13. The method of claim 1 , further comprising the acts of:

for each pixel on the projected light ray:

determining the opacity of points intersected by the projected light ray at the pixel, wherein the opacity of a point between any two of the pixels is computed using-an interpolation of values of the stored depth and opacity layers;

reducing the accumulated visibility of light ray by the opacity of the intersected point; and

stopping the reducing when an accumulated visibility of the light ray is zero.

14. The method of claim 1 , wherein the light source is stochastically sampled to generate a plurality of light positions; and a plurality of light rays are computed as originating from these sampled light positions; and the shadow factor of the area light source is computed by aggregating the shadow factors of the plurality of light rays.

15. A computer enabled method for generating soft shadows in an image of an object for an area light source, comprising the acts of:

generating a shadow map depicting at least the object;

storing in a computer readable memory multiple layers of depth and opacity values for each pixel in the generated shadow map while rendering the object lit with the area light source;

computing in a computer processor a projected ray for each of a plurality of stochastically sampled light positions on the area light source;

tracing the projected ray through the layers of the shadow map;

accumulating visibility along the traced ray as a function of the stored depth and opacity values in each pixel of the shadow map that the ray overlaps;

computing in the computer processor a shadow factor of each traced ray as 1 minus the accumulated visibility of that ray;

wherein for each pixel there is provided a list of the layers of the multilayer depth map, each layer having a depth of the first samples in the layer, an accumulated opacity of all the samples in the layer, and a count of samples in the layer; and

computing in the computer processor a shadow factor of the area light source as the weighted average of the computed shadow factors of the plurality of the sampled light rays.