SpLit: interactive light dialing as creative vehicle

In this talk we present SpLit, a lighting manipulation tool created at Sony Pictures Imageworks designed to encourage experimentation and creativity when creating and manipulating CG lighting via a novel and artist friendly visual interface. We discovered that artists are often discouraged from experimenting and making sweeping lighting changes due to the complexity of the currently available user interfaces for CG lighting. Manipulating, rendering and evaluating the decisions is a cyclical process that requires multiple clicks through various UI elements, and the rendering takes time to resolve to a point where the results of the changes can be evaluated. With SpLit we focused on tightening the manipulation and decision-making loop and bringing it into the realm of realtime to encourage experimentation and creative freedom.