Interactive light transport editing for flexible global illumination.

The limited flexibility imposed by the physics of light transport has been a major hurdle in the use of global illumination in production rendering. It has been a common practice in computer cinematography to write custom shaders [Christensen 2003] or manually edit rendered images [Thacker 2006] to achieve lighting effects desired by directors. This process is lengthy, cumbersome and too technical for artists. To remove this hurdle, we propose a novel interface that allows users to modify light transport in a scene. Users can adjust effects of indirect lighting cast by one object onto another or paint indirect illumination on surfaces. As opposed to previous approaches such as [Schoeneman et al. 1993] our work departs from solving optimization problems in favor of more user control.