Visibility Editing For All-Frequency Shadow Design

Abstract

We present an approach for editing shadows in all-frequency lighting environments. To support artistic control, we propose to decouple shadowing from lighting and focus on providing intuitive controls to edit the former. To accomplish this task, we precompute and store scene visibility information separately from lighting and BRDFs and allow artists to edit visibility directly, by providing operations to select shadows and edit their shape. To facilitate a wider range of editing operations, we generalize visibility from binary to three-channel oating point quantities and introduce a novel shadow representation based on computation of visibility ratios between the original render and the edited one. We demonstrate our results for diffuse and glossy surfaces, still scenes and animations.