Path-space manipulation of physically-based light transport

  • Authors:
  • Thorsten-Walther Schmidt;Jan Novák;Johannes Meng;Anton S. Kaplanyan;Tim Reiner;Derek Nowrouzezahrai;Carsten Dachsbacher

  • Affiliations:
  • Karlsruhe Institute of Technology;Karlsruhe Institute of Technology;Karlsruhe Institute of Technology;Karlsruhe Institute of Technology;Karlsruhe Institute of Technology;Université de Montréal;Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG) - SIGGRAPH 2013 Conference Proceedings
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Industry-quality content creation relies on tools for lighting artists to quickly prototype, iterate, and refine final renders. As industry-leading studios quickly adopt physically-based rendering (PBR) across their art generation pipelines, many existing tools have become unsuitable as they address only simple effects without considering underlying PBR concepts and constraints. We present a novel light transport manipulation technique that operates directly on path-space solutions of the rendering equation. We expose intuitive direct and indirect manipulation approaches to edit complex effects such as (multi-refracted) caustics, diffuse and glossy indirect bounces, and direct/indirect shadows. With our sketch- and object-space selection, all built atop a parameterized regular expression engine, artists can search and isolate shading effects to inspect and edit. We classify and filter paths on the fly and visualize the selected transport phenomena. We survey artists who used our tool to manipulate complex phenomena on both static and animated scenes.