Original Post
Hello Gamedev 
I'm currently working on my master thesis that compares various ways to filter shadow maps and stumbled upon a problem with Variance Shadow Maps. Is it possible to omit rendering in shadow receiver in to shadow map? What i've read from original paper, it's not, due to possible high variance between shadow caster and shadow receiver. But it's quite common in games to skip some object from rendering in to shadow map(for example, terrain that can have shadows from raycasting technique, explicit per object shadow maps etc.).
Is there any kind of "trick" for that kind of situations? Or is it common to just use old plain shadow maps in this case?
