Lightning Engine

One method for reducing the aliasing of traditional shadow maps, is to soften the edges. By using such a technique the alliasing problem of the depth shadow maps is less noticeable and the resulting image is closer to the real world shadows. Also textures with lower resolution can be used without noticeable visual artifacts.
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Parallel Split Shadow Maps (PSSM) is a shadow mapping technique which tries to minimize shadow aliasing by splitting the view frustum into smaller regions, each one covered by a separate small shadow buffer, effectively distributing the shadow buffer resolution more evenly along the view frustum. For more details on how the algorithm works see the original paper.

What we will present here is the way we integrated PSSM into the engine. First we’ll take a look at how different shadow algorithms can be implemented as plugins to the engine, based on one common interface, and then we will jump into the details of our implementation.
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We’ve recently added shadow mask support in one of the render paths used in Lightning Engine, and i thought of testing how much does stencil masking helps performance.
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