
320 Applied Geometry for Computer Graphics and CAD
cases when the silhouettes are linear may need to be treated sepa-
rately.
11.17. Consider the surface of revolution of the curve (f(u), 0,g(u)) (f(u) =
0) about the z-axis given by x(u, v)=(f(u)cosv,f(u)sinv, g(u)).
Show that the silhouettes for a parallel view in the z-direction are
circles lying in planes that are perpendicular to the z-axis.
11.18. Show that, for a parallel projection in the z-direction, the silhouette
curves of the torus of Example 11.5 are circles.
11.19. Show that, for a parallel projection in the x-direction, the silhouette
curves of the torus of Example 11.5 are circles.
11.6 Shadows
A shadow is a region of a object’s surface where illumination is reduced due to
the obstruction of light sources by other objects in the scene. The amount of
diffuse light is reduced, but there is still a contribution of ambient light. When
a shading algorithm is applied to a scene, shadows appear in regions where
the intensities are significantly less than the surrounding intensities. Shading
algorithms do not always produce a satisfactory result. For some surfaces it is
possible to determine the boundary of the shadow region mathematically by
applying a projection with the light source as the viewpoint and the surfaces
of objects in the scene as “viewplanes”. The boundaries of an object’s shadow
are the projected images of edges and silhouettes of the obscuring objects onto
the surface.
The shadows cast by a polygonal surface onto a planar surface are straight-
forward to compute. A polygon is a union of triangular planar facets, and it
follows from Exercise 11.4 that each facet either has no silhouette, or is entirely
in silhouette and does not contribute to the shadow. Therefore, a polygon casts
a shadow that is bounded by the projected images of the polygon edges: these
can be found using the method of Section 4.3.
Example 11.9
The scene in Figure 11.18(a) consists of a sphere, with radius
1
2
and centre
1
2
,
1
2
, 1
, that has been embedded in a unit cube. The shadow cast onto the
plane z = 0 is determined by (i) computing the silhouette of the sphere, (ii)
projecting the silhouette and the edges of the cube using the light source as
viewpoint and the flat surface as viewplane, and (iii) shading the bounded