Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows
Abstract
Recently several distributed rendering systems have been developed which exploit a cluster of commodity computers by connecting host graphics cards over a fast network to form a compositing pipeline. This paper introduces a new algorithm which takes advantage of the programmable compositing operators in these systems to improve the performance of rendering multiple shadow-maps, for example to produce approximate soft shadows. With an nVidia GeForce4 Ti graphics card the new algorithm reduces the number of required render nodes by nearly a factor of four compared with a naive approach. We show results that yield interactive-speed rendering of 32 shadows on a 9-node Sepia2a distributed rendering cluster.
BibTeX
@inproceedings {10.2312:EGPGV:EGPGV02:071-076,
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization},
editor = {D. Bartz and X. Pueyo and E. Reinhard},
title = {{Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows}},
author = {Isard, M. and Shand, M. and Heirich, A.},
year = {2002},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-348X},
ISBN = {1-58113-579-3},
DOI = {10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/071-076}
}
booktitle = {Eurographics Workshop on Parallel Graphics and Visualization},
editor = {D. Bartz and X. Pueyo and E. Reinhard},
title = {{Distributed rendering of interactive soft shadows}},
author = {Isard, M. and Shand, M. and Heirich, A.},
year = {2002},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association},
ISSN = {1727-348X},
ISBN = {1-58113-579-3},
DOI = {10.2312/EGPGV/EGPGV02/071-076}
}