Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) for surface representation are commonly generated offline and subsequently loaded into interactive applications like games. Since they are not updated every frame, they only provide a rigid surface representation. While there are methods to generate them quickly on GPU, the efficiency of these approaches is limited at high resolutions. This paper showcases a novel technique that combines jump flooding and ray tracing to generate approximate SDFs in real-time for soft shadow approximation, achieving prominent shadow penumbras while maintaining interactive frame rates.
@article{arxiv.2210.04449,
title = {RTSDF: Generating Signed Distance Fields in Real Time for Soft Shadow Rendering},
author = {Yu Wei Tan and Nicholas Chua and Clarence Koh and Anand Bhojan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.04449},
year = {2022}
}