orpheus@reed.UUCP (P. Hawthorne) (01/30/91)
I am about to implement shadows for the priority sort algorithm. The shadow map method is appropriate for complicated scenes, but my application uses a priority sort for interactive and simple scenes. I have been able to maintain independence between the two methods until now, so a shadow method for the priority sort is desirable. In completing my notes, it occured to me that by tesselating a light surface into points, you could render umbra and penumbra by dividing the intensity of the light by the number of tesselations. It would be costly, but it just might work. Foley and van Dam, however, says that similar attempts were not able to calculate specular componants for area sources. Why? orpheus@reed