Quote - does it cast shadows?

would it be equivalent to depth map shadows in Firefly?

Thanks.

Very good question. In fact you could see the photon map as a generalization of a shadow map. The main differences are that a shadow maps are stored in a 2-dimensional map, whereas a photon map is stored in a 3-dimensional map (i.e. in the surfaces of the scene).  Firefly's shadow maps also do not consider transparent or reflecting objects, so they are not equivalent, but the way they work is very similar. You could say that photon maps are to shadow maps what pathtracing is to raytraced shadows (pathtracing being the stuff that luxrender does).