Targeting Shape and Material in Lighting Design

Abstract

Product lighting design is a laborious and time-consuming task. With product illustrations being increasingly rendered, the lighting challenge transferred to the virtual realm. Our approach targets lighting design in the context of a scene with fixed objects, materials, and camera parameters, illuminated by environmental lighting. Our solution offers control over the depiction of material characteristics and shape details by optimizing the illuminating environment-map. To that end, we introduce a metric that assesses the shape and material cues in terms of the designed appearance. We formalize the process and support steering the outcome using additional design constraints. We illustrate our solution with several challenging examples.