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Transparent shadowmapping
Thursday, October 9, 2003 | Permalink

Executable
Source code
TransparentShadowMapping.zip (1.2 MB)

Required:
Pixel shader 2.0
Vertex shader 2.0
Normally shadowmapping uses only a single channel of the texture the scene is rendered to. Using that depth you can extract information about whether the current fragment is in shadow or not. However, this only works for opaque occluders. This demo extends the idea to work for transparent surfaces too, and makes transparent surfaces cast a projection of itself over the scene. To do this not only the depth is rendered to the texture, but also a color. Opaque surfaces renders white along with the depth, while transparent surface renders its color and leaves the depth unmodified. Then by simply multiplying the shadow factor contructed in a normal shadowmapping fashion with the color stored in the shadow map you'll get a nice projection of transparent surfaces over the scene.

The demo should works on Radeon 9500 and up and the GeForce FX.