CS6610 Interactive Graphics Final

This project was my submission for the final in my interactive computer graphics project at the University of Utah. It features an implementation of Eric Heitz's real-time area light technique described in his paper Real-Time Polygonal-Light Shading with Linearly Transformed Cosines. The technique analytically approximates the integral of the light and BRDF over the hemisphere of the currently shaded point, providing fast and accurate results.

What the technique fails to handle is the soft shadows that result from such an area light. As a rudimentary proof of concept, I approximated soft shadows using a series of orthographically projected shadow maps from the perspective of the light at multiple different view angles. Then, in my fragment shader, I calculate which subset of shadow maps to query and average their results. While the "soft" shadows appear reasonably realistic for a proof of concept, the computation required per frame is unfeasible for any usage.