Illumination Editing and Visualization for Physically Based Rendering

Enabling lighting artists to quickly prototype, iterate and refine a rendered image is essential for industrial-grade content creation, as evidenced by the many lighting tools available. As leading studios are quickly adopting Physically-Based Rendering (PBR) across their art generation pipelines, many of these tools have become unsuitable as they only address simple shading effects without considering the underlying PBR concepts and constraints. We present a novel light manipulation technique that operates directly in a physically based renderer. We expose intuitive direct and indirect manipulation approaches for editing complex shading effects, such as (multi-refracted) caustics, diffuse and glossy indirect illumination, and direct and indirect shadows. With our sketch- and object-based selection, all built atop a parameterized classification, artists can search and isolate effects they wish to inspect and edit. We classify and filter illumination features on the fly (without precomputation) and support the user with a visualization of the selected transport phenomena.