shadow_cast_2d — GFX2D light op

Data kinds: image2dimage2d

Call: import gfx2d; gfx2d.shadow_cast_2d(occluder, x, y, steps=None, softness=0.0) (or opsgfx2d.get("shadow_cast_2d"))

Usage

Visibility of every pixel from a point light at `(x, y), as image2d`.

Ray-marches the segment from each pixel to the light, sampling `occluder`

(2-D, `[0, 1], 1 = fully blocking) at steps` points with nearest

lookup, and returns `1 - max(occluder along the ray)`. For a binary

occluder that is exactly 0 or 1 — no tolerance involved.

The sample excludes the pixel itself, so an occluder is lit on its own

light-facing surface and casts behind itself.

`softness > 0` blurs the visibility map by that sigma afterwards, which is

a penumbra-shaped lie rather than a penumbra: a real one widens with

distance from the occluder. It is offered because it looks right and named

so it cannot be mistaken for physics.

`steps` defaults to the image diagonal, which samples about once per

pixel. An occluder thinner than the step spacing can be missed; that is

the honest limit of a fixed-step march and the reason `steps` is an

argument.

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

gfx2d_scenepy -3.11 examples/gfx2d_scene.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept image2d as input)

dither

Same category (light)

radial_light · light_mask · normal_map_decode · normal_map_shade


*Provenance: gfx2d.py — GFX2D operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.