I have found this SVG that creates some of the shadows but it only works in Chrome (Firefox and Safari on OS X do not display the shadows)
I'm trying to reimplement the visual look of Material Design in pure SVG for a project and I'm interested in a solution that follows as much of the design requirements from Elevation Shadows section in the Material Design Specs.
I have programatic control over the generated SVG so, if the parameters of the filters are easier to express in computations based on elevation, please specify so.
This is a comprehensive drop shadow filter structure that duplicates all the functionality of the drop shadow control in Photoshop. I wrote a mini-app to allow you to change any of these parameters and copy and paste the resulting filter: http://codepen.io/mullany/pen/sJopz
<filter id="drop-shadow" color-interpolation-filters="sRGB" x="-50%" y="-50%" height="200%" width="200%">
<!-- Take source alpha, offset it by angle/distance and blur it by size -->
<feOffset id="offset" in="SourceAlpha" dx="-5.49" dy="-5.11" result="SA-offset"/>
<feGaussianBlur id="blur" in="SA-offset" stdDeviation="4.75" result="SA-o-blur"/>
<!-- Apply a contour by using a color curve transform on the alpha and clipping the result to the input -->
<feComponentTransfer in="SA-o-blur" result="SA-o-b-contIN">
<feFuncA id="contour" type="table" tableValues="0 1"/>
</feComponentTransfer>
<feComposite operator="in" in="SA-o-blur" in2="SA-o-b-contIN" result="SA-o-b-cont"/>
<!-- Adjust the spread by multiplying alpha by a constant factor --> <feComponentTransfer in="SA-o-b-cont" result="SA-o-b-c-sprd">
<feFuncA id="spread-ctrl" type="linear" slope="2.4"/>
</feComponentTransfer>
<!-- Adjust color and opacity by adding fixed offsets and an opacity multiplier -->
<feColorMatrix id="recolor" in="SA-o-b-c-sprd" type="matrix" values="1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 .8 0" result="SA-o-b-c-s-recolor"/>
<!-- Generate a reasonably grainy noise input with baseFrequency between approx .5 to 2.0. And add the noise with k1 and k2 multipliers that sum to 1 -->
<feTurbulence result="fNoise" type="fractalNoise" numOctaves="6" baseFrequency="1.98"/>
<feColorMatrix in="fNoise" type="matrix" values="1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 7 -3" result="clipNoise"/>
<feComposite id="noisemix" operator="arithmetic" in="SA-o-b-c-s-recolor" in2="clipNoise" k1="0" k2="1" result="SA-o-b-c-s-r-mix"/>
<!-- Merge the shadow with the original -->
<feMerge>
<feMergeNode in="SA-o-b-c-s-r-mix"/>
<feMergeNode in="SourceGraphic"/>
</feMerge>
</filter>