RENDERING SPACES FOR ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENTS

Jeffry Nimeroff, Julie Dorsey, Eero Simoncelli, and Norman I. Badler

Presence, the Journal of Virtual Reality and Teleoperators, Volume 4, Number 3, Summer 1995

In this paper we present a new framework for rendering virtual environments. This framework is proposed as a complete scene description, which embodies the space of all possible renderings, under all possible lighting scenarios of the given scene. In effect, this hypothetical rendering space includes all possible light sources as part of the geometric model. While it would be impractical to implement the general framework, this approach does allow us to look at the rendering problem in a new way. Thus, we propose new representations that are subspaces of the entire rendering space. Some of these subspaces are computationally tractable and may be carefully chosen to serve a particular application. The approach is useful both for real and virtual scenes. The framework includes methods for rendering environments which are illuminated by artificial light, natural light, or a combination of the two models.

An example of the linearity of the rendering operator for fixed geometry and light source positions.

A bar scene with the bar lights on.

A bar scene with the fireplace lights on.

A bar scene with both sets of lights on computed via linear combination of the first two images.

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