Automating Lighting Design for Interactive Entertainment

Recent advances in computer graphics, particularly in real-time rendering, have caused major improvements in 3D graphics and rendering techniques used in interactive entertainment. In this paper, we focus on the scene lighting process, which we define as the process of configuring the number of lights used in a scene, their properties (e.g. range and attenuation), positions, angles, and colors. Lighting design is well known among designers, directors, and visual artists for its vital role in influencing viewers’ perception by evoking moods, directing their gaze to important areas (i.e. providing visual focus), and conveying visual tension. It is, however, difficult to set positions, angles, or colors for lights within interactive scenes to accommodate these design goals, because an interactive scene’s spatial and dramatic configuration, including mood, dramatic intensity, and the relative importance of different characters, change unpredictably in real-time. There are several techniques developed by the game industry that establish spectacular real-time lighting effects within 3-D interactive environments. These techniques are often time and labor intensive. In addition, they are not easily used to dynamically mold the visual design to convey communicative, dramatic, and aesthetic functions as addressed in creative disciplines, such as art, film, and theatre. In this paper, we present a new real-time lighting design model based on cinematic and theatric lighting design theory. The proposed model is designed to automatically, and in real-time, adjust lighting in an interactive scene accommodating the dramatic, aesthetic, and communicative functions described by traditional lighting design theories while accommodating artistic constraints concerning style, visual continuity, and aesthetic function