Abstract

The declarative design of graphics lies at the core of the the Smart Graphics research agenda. For 3D graphics the number of lights included, and the properties of these lights, has an enormous impact on what a viewer can judge about the content (the ob jects), properties (the geometric characteristics and spatial relations of the ob jects) and other aesthetic qualities of a scene. The traditional approach to lighting design for image synthesis is based on manual design methods, whereby users interactively specify values of lighting parameters, render the scene, and modify the lighting parameters until the desired visual properties of the scene are achieved. Non-expert users encounter a number of difficulties in selecting the appropriate lighting parameters, as the process requires both a subtle technical and aesthetic understanding of lighting in computer graphics. We review range of “smart” lighting design and steady slow convergence on ideal lighting approaches which optimise the lighting configuration for a scene with respect to a set of absolute perceptual metrics. More recently perceptual approaches have been combined with aspects of exemplar driven approaches to yield “lighting-by-example” techniques that can replicate the lighting of existing static 2D images and 3D scenes.

Keywords

Human-computer interaction