I asked Daniel Scherzer about my post about his book. He said it’s about right (and the long subtitle is indeed a Verlag decision).

The cool thing that turned up: their upcoming STAR survey on hard shadows will be more theoretical and detailed than his thesis’ survey. It will be similar to the hard shadow section in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 course Casting Shadows in Real Time (which has a solid 90 pages on direct illumination shadow algorithms, plus more on related methods).

I’ve updated the original post with this information, but wanted to make a separate post so that people wouldn’t miss this valuable overview on shadows and ambient occlusion (just a tiny bit on the latter).