Another aspect of the invention provides an image rendering pipeline including a polygon identification stage
and a pixel rendering stage, wherein the pixel rendering stage comprises: a rasteriser which rasterises pixel parameters
for each pixel, including a colour parameter; a texture mapping stage which modifies said colour parameter according
to texture values; a shadow mask determination stage which generates a shadow mask identifying for each of a plurality
of pixels on a shadow receiving surface a grey level representing the intensity of shadow in each pixel, the intensity
having been determined utilising the distance between a shadow-casting object and the shadow-receiving object;
wherein the texture value is modulated using each grey level whereby soft shadows in the final image can be rendered