A new way of doing lighting, called "relighting"

TRADITIONAL APPROACH TO LIGHTING

With the commercial software solutions available today, lighters are accustomed to adjusting lighting parameters in a GUI providing only a simplified preview, then running an external rendering engine to compute the final result.

In the best case scenario, with simple scenes, this process takes dozens of seconds. With real production scenes, it can take minutes or hours. Feedback time is proportional to the complexity of the geometry.

With such approach, geometry must be regenerated at each iteration. Scenes with trees, fur, hair or crowds become a nightmare in production. A full day may pass before the final, rendered image can be seen. Most of the time lighters are paid to wait.

BAKERY RELIGHT™: A NEW APPROACH TO LIGHTING

Unlike existing tools, our relighting tool is dedicated to lighting. It is customized and optimized for a lighter's workflow. Instead of having a 3D program coupled with a separate renderer, we have an interactive 3D program in the rendering engine itself.

When a lighter changes a parameter, only the strict minimum is recomputed. The result of complex computations are saved to disk so they need not be recomputed. As a result, lighting iterations which would take hours with a traditional approach can be performed in seconds.

This concept of using the result of a previous rendering to increase the speed of future renderings is called "relighting". The longer you work, the faster the computation.

Imagine you have to light a character with millions of hairs. When you need to change the color or shading of the hair, the new image is recomputed interactively. The geometric computations for the hair have already been performed. The same paradigm applies to material shading, global illumination, ray tracing, texturing, shadows, etc.

BOOST PRODUCTIVITY, RAISE QUALITY

Having feedback within seconds instead of minutes boosts productivity tremendously. We estimate the increase in productivity on the overall lighting process to be around 300%. Lighters can choose to either increase their productivity or tweak their lighting to improve quality. Most of the time they can do both.

The goal of our relighting tool is to provide the user with the increased productivity he needs to be able to focus on the artistic aspect of lighting, and allow the delivery of high quality images regardless of scene complexity.