Realistic real-time rendering of light shafts using blur filter: considering the effect of shadow maps

Abstract

The ray marching method has become the most attractive method to provide realism in rendering the effects of light scattering in the participating media of numerous applications. This has attracted significant attention from scientific community. Up-sampling of ray marching method is suitable for rendering light shafts of realistic scenes, but suffers of consume a lot of time for rendering. Therefore, some encouraging outcomes have been achieved by using down-sampling of ray marching approach to accelerate rendered scenes. However, these methods are inherently prone to artifacts, aliasing and incorrect boundaries due to the reduced number of sample points along view rays. This research proposes a realistic real-time technique to generate soft light shafts by making use downsampling of ray marching in generating light shafts. The bilateral filtering is then applied to overcome all defects that caused by downsampling process to make a scene with smoothing transition while preserving on the edges. The contribution of this technique is to improve the boundaries of light shafts taking into account the effect of shadows. This technique allows obtaining soft marvelous light shafts, having a good performance and high quality. Thus, it is suitable for interactive applications.