Variance Shadow Maps

Shadow mapping is a popular way of getting dynamic shadows, but suffers from aliasing artifacts that cannot be addressed by usual texture filtering. The reason boils down to the fact that the average of depth test results (which is what we want) is not the same as the result of a test on the average of depths (which is what hardware does).

The trivial way to do it anyway is the Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) technique, and usually stands in papers as the expensive upper bound.

Variance Shadow Maps are a simple technique allowing filtering, including some Gaussian blur for example, thus giving soft shadows (the blur does not depends on the distance from the occluder though). The main drawback of the algorithm is the light bleeding artifact that occurs as soon as the scene complexity is too important. I also found it to be fairly expensive in terms of texture memory since it requires twice as much as regular shadow maps, and another times two for blurring.

One could argue VSM are some pretty old stuff already, but because of the elegance of the trick they rely upon and the ease of implementation, I really like them.