VR Shadows and Materials

Custom shadows and materials built with pixel shaders to lighten the rendering load for VR — neither technique relies on translucency or post-processing.

Instead of translucency, a ray is traced from the light to the object and beyond, to whatever object sits behind it; at the point of impact, pixels on that material are darkened based on the size and distance of the object blocking the light, letting overlapping shadows compound. Doing this in the pixel shader skips extra rendering steps and overdraw that translucency would otherwise cost.