Interactive Lighting Simulation for Theatrical Lighting Design

The goal of our project is to create lighting simulation software that is practical and useful for theatrical lighting designers. Our software allows the user to import 3D models and material data from external 3D modeling software, and then gives the user extensive control over how these 3D models are lit using simulations of theatrical lighting instruments. By using a variety of rendering techniques for different tasks, we achieve a more interactive user experience than is provided by other similar software. The user interface uses standard OpenGL lighting to provide inaccurate but real-time feedback of the effects of light position, focus and color. In addition, we implemented a new relighting-optimized radiosity renderer of our own design, which provides fairly accurate and highly interactive feedback to changes in lighting instrument intensity and color. The software also provides very high quality non-real-time renders using Radiance to produce very accurate images of how a lighting design would appear in the real world