Abstract
In computer cinematography, the process of lighting design
involves placing and configuring lights to define the visual
appearance of environments and to enhance story elements. This
process is labor intensive and time consuming, primarily
because lighting artists receive poor feedback from existing
tools: interactive previews have very poor quality, while
final-quality images often take hours to render.
This paper presents an interactive cinematic lighting system
used in the production of computer-animated feature films
containing environments of very high complexity, in which
surface and light appearances are described using procedural
RenderMan shaders. Our system provides lighting artists with
high-quality previews at interactive framerates with only small
approximations compared to the final rendered images. This is
accomplished by combining numerical estimation of surface
response, image-space caching, deferred shading, and the
computational power of modern graphics hardware.
Our system has been successfully used in the production of two
feature-length animated films, dramatically accelerating
lighting tasks. In our experience interactivity fundamentally
changes an artist's workflow, improving both productivity and
artistic expressiveness.
Citation: Fabio Pellacini, Kiril Vidimče, Aaron Lefohn, Mark Leone,
Alex Mohr, John Warren, Lpics: a Hybrid Hardware-Accelerated
Relighting Engine for Computer Cinematography, SIGGRAPH 2005
(ACM Transactions on Graphics), pp. 464-470.
