LightShop: An interactive lighting system incorporating the 2D image editing paradigm

Abstract

Lighting is a fundamental and important process in the 3D animation pipeline. Conventional lighting workflow is time-consuming and labor-intensive. A user must fiddle with a range of unintuitive parameters one by one for a large set of lights continually to achieve the desired effect. LightShop, introduced here, provides the user with an intuitive and interactive interface employing the paradigm of 2D image editing software: direct sketching on objects and simultaneous control of the overall look of the lighting. The system then determines the optimal number of lights and their parameters automatically and rapidly. This is achieved by converting the user inputs to a data map and mining the information of the lights from the data map via data clustering while measuring the cluster validity. An experiments show that LightShop dramatically simplifies the laborious and tedious lighting process and helps the user generate high-quality and creative lighting conditions with ease. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.