Interactive Lighting and Material Design System for Cyber Worlds

Abstract

Interactive rendering under complex real world illumination is essential for many applications such as material design, lighting design, and virtual realities. For such applications, interactive manipulations of viewpoints, lighting, BRDFs, and positions of objects are beneficial to designers and users. This paper proposes a system that acquires complex, all-frequency lighting environments and renders dynamic scenes under captured illumination, for lighting and material design applications in cyber worlds. To capture real world lighting environments easily, our method uses a camera equipped with a cellular phone. To handle dynamic scenes of rigid objects and dynamic BRDFs, our method decomposes the visibility function at each vertex of each object into the occlusion due to the object itself and occlusions due to other objects, which are represented by a nonlinear piecewise constant approximation, called cuts. Our method proposes a compact cut representation and efficient algorithm for cut operations. By using our system, interactive manipulation of positions of objects and real time rendering with dynamic viewpoints, lighting, and BRDFs can be achieved.