Lighting with Sketches

Lighting design is a fundamental aspect of computer cinematography, where it is used to support storytelling by affecting the mood, style, and believability of a scene. Traditionally, lighting has required the tedious adjustment of the large set of parameters that describe complex lighting setups, including lights positions, colors, shapes, etc. This work presents an interactive user interface that facilitates lighting workflow by using a sketching paradigm for light creation. Lights are specified by a series of strokes that define various properties of illumination such as shape of the light and position of illuminated and shadowed areas. The system will then perform a nonlinear optimization over all the light parameters to find a match to the controlling sketches. To demonstrate our prototype system, we lit a simple scene fully with our application, showing that sketching paradigms are promising to facilitate the lighting workflow.