BBSC 303 Digital Craft Lecture 6 April 4 2006

Merete talked today about the light flow meter that will be an integral part of the rendering assignment. She explained its origins in lighting history and theory and described the purposes of its components. The background papers for this talk are available on the School of Architecture intranet ("the R drive" ). Of particular note was the requirement that each student place an array of light flow meters (using the 3DS Viz array command) after merging the meter into their model. The meter comprises a flat white sphere, a shiny black sphere and a flat white plate with a peg or shadow casting gnomon on each side. Merete described the three aspects of light distribution that each part of the meter is intended to describe.

My talk was about the craft skills involved in using the Light Studio interface to Radiance. I showed:

• the light studio material generator, including a small demonstration of the material script editor
• the light studio render interface, including switching on and off ambient and geometry files for efficient rendering
• high dynamic range images of the type you are required to produce, and how you might use these .pic format images to explore the view that the eye rather than the camera 'sees'

The following links are extremely useful and revealing of the potential of HDR images.

• image based lighting
• rendering synthetic objects into real scenes
• Paul Debevec's Fiat Lux movie
• Recovering hdr radiance maps from photographs
• rendering with natural light
  
• rendering with natural light sources