Designing and developing an interactive narrative experience includes development of story content as well as a visual composition plan for visually realizing the story content. Theatre directors, filmmakers, and animators have emphasized the importance of visual design. Choices of character placements, lighting configuration, and camera movements, have been documented by designers to have dire...

Rendered images of varied lighting conditions in a virtual environment have been shown to provide a perceptually accurate visual impression of those in a real environment, providing a valuable tool set for the development and communication of new lighting solutions. In order to further improve this tool set, an experiment was conducted to assess the impact of image size and viewing interactivit...

The field of volume visualization has undergone rapid development during the past years, both due to advances in suitable computing hardware and due to the increasing availability of large volume datasets. Recent work has focused on increasing the lighting realism in interactive raycasting by integrating a number of visually plausible but often effect-specific optimizations. These improvements ...

The addition of global illumination can dramatically increase the realism achievable when rendering virtual environments. In particular with interactive applications we expect the environment to reflect changes in the scene due to global lighting effects instead of it being just a static backdrop. However, a sufficiently fast and accurate computation of global illumination at interactive rates ...

Realistic rendering animation is known to be an expensive processing task when physically based global illumination methods are used in order to improve illumination details. This paper presents the Multi-Frame Lighting Method, an efficient algorithm to compute animations in radiosity environments. The method, based on global Monte Carlo techniques, performs the lighting simulation of groups of...

This paper presents novel interactive visualization techniques for inspecting the global light transport in virtual scenes. First, we propose a simple extension to photon mapping to gather required lighting information. We then introduce a set of five light inspection tools which process this data to provide further insights. Corresponding visualizations help the user to comprehend how light tr...

We present a method for interactive rendering of dynamic models with self-shadows due to time-varying, lowfrequency lighting environments. In contrast to previous techniques, the method is not limited to static or preanimated models. Our main contribution is a hemispherical rasterizer, which rapidly computes visibility by rendering blocker geometry into a 2D occlusion mask with correct occluder...

We present a new method for interactive illumination computations based on precomputed visibility using coherent shadow maps (CSMs). It is well-known that visibility queries dominate the cost of physically based rendering. Precomputing all visibility events, for instance in the form of many shadow maps, enables fast queries and allows for real-time computation of illumination but requires prohi...

Daylight simulation for generic environments involves visibility computations from an infinite area light source (the sky). In order to obtain accurate results, this task tends to be very time consuming and also requires a good model discretization that is not automatically done in general. This paper presents a daylight simulation method for interactive direct lighting visualization that perfo...