Automatic lighting design from photographic rules

Lighting design is crucial in 3D scenes modeling for its ability to provide cues to understand the objects shape. However a lot of time, skills, trials and errors are required to obtain a desired result. Existing automatic lighting methods for conveying the shape of 3D objects are based either on costly optimizations or on non-realistic shading effects. Also they do not take the material information into account. In this paper, we propose a new method that automatically suggests a lighting setup to reveal the shape of a 3D model, taking into account its material and its geometric properties. Our method is independent from the rendering algorithm. It is based on lighting rules extracted from photography books, applied through a fast and simple geometric analysis. We illustrate our algorithm on objects having different shapes and materials, and we show by both visual and metric evaluation that it is comparable to optimization methods in terms of lighting setups quality. Thanks to its genericity our algorithm could be integrated in any rendering pipeline to suggest appropriate lighting.