This page describes the precomputed radiance transfer system I built for assignment 2 in CS294-13 (Advanced Rendering Techniques). This system allows real-time re-lighting of a scene with a fixed
viewpoint. The technique relies on a set of precomputed images which are linearly combined to
produce the final version.
Completed Features
* Basic relighting system using a small number of lights
* Real-time adjustments of weights to relight by varying light intensity and/or direction
I made a short screencast to demo my results in real-time. The movie (Quicktime) can be downloaded here: JamesOsheaDemo.mov .
Basic Relighting System
For my basic relighting system, I started with a static scene and precomputed
the image data for a small number of directional light sources using a raytracer
from a previous assignment. I turned the global illumination off, but the scene
was still rendered with correct shadows, reflections, and shading. These images
are also antialiased. In this example, I used
41 lights uniformly distributed in the upper hemisphere of the scene. I rendered
a scene consisting of a stack of balls on a gray ground plane. Here are a couple
of the precomputed images:
Each image represents how the scene looks from one individual light. Because each
image takes about a minute to render, it would be impossible to
relight this scene in real-time using my basic ray-tracing code. By precomputing these
images however, the computationally expensive rendering is completed offline and
combining the images can be done in real-time.
The image-based
relighting system loads these images into memory and then interactively renders the
scene in real time by linearly combining a weighted average of the input images. In
my system, the user can control the direction of illumination by simply dragging the
mouse within the window. The user is also able to control how diffuse the lighting is
using a keystroke. The images are weighted according to the distance between the
light direction used to render the image and the light direction set by the user.
The weights are adjusted according to the diffuseness of the lighting set by the
user as well. If the user desires more diffuse lighting, then a wider set of nearby
light sources are preferentially weighted.
In the above screenshot, the user has set a diffuse light to be slightly to the
left and behind the viewer. This resulting image is a weighted average of the input
images which were rendered from nearby light sources.
In this example above, the light has been set to be less diffuse. The input images
which were generated from closer light directions were weighted more heavily than further
light directions.
I can also change the colors/weights of the lights individually. In the above example,
I've reset the colors and weights of the lights such that a slightly reddish light is coming
from the lefthand side and a slightly greenish light is coming from the right.
Image-based Lighting System
I expanded the basic relighting system to handle more complex lighting with an environment
map. This system is similar to the basic version except it is scaled up to handle enough light
positions to support a simple environment map. I upgraded the system to handle simple cube
environment maps with 16x16 faces. This requres precomputing the lighting for 6x16x16 = 1536
light directions. In order to reduce the data demands of such precomputations, I lowered the resolution
of my output images to 256x256.
As with the previous system, I precomputed my original same for all 1536 light directions. Using
this data, I can first simply relight the scene in real-time with different light directions and
different light concentrations. Here are a couple examples of this in which I'm rotating the light direction
around the scene (note the shadows are softer since I am linearly combining data from a larger set of input light
directions):
Using this precomputed data, I can also load in an environment map and relight the scene according to the light values
and colors in the map.
First I loaded a simple environment map consisting of 6 colored lights, one in each
face of the cube map (above).
I can also rotate the environment map, and these two images (above) show
the scene after the environment map has been rotated a little.
I can also load in environment maps acquired from natural lighting.
The above image is an example of my scene rendered using the Grace Cathedral
environment map from Paul Debevec.
This example (above) was relight using the Eucalyptus Grove map from Paul Debevec.
This example (above) was relight using the Kitchen map from Paul Debevec.