Final Project

Group Members

Nicolas Benitez

Michael Graeb

Proposal

For our final project, we will be attempting to create an image of a waterfront city similar to those pictured below.

The main technical goal of our project will be to investigate and implement a time of day-dependant lighting system that simulates the different types of environmental lighting found in outdoor areas. We hope to create a lighting system that will approximate the changes in spectra that occur at different times of day and produce convincing lighting and sky color. We hope that our lighting model will be allow us to reproduce the dramatic coloration that is seen on the reflective building surfaces in our referance images. In addition to helping reproduce our source images, such a lighting mechanism would be a very convenient resource for any outdoor scene, since a time could be specified and appropriate lighting and sky coloration would be generated procedurally without needing to capture an environment map for the scene.

Additional challenges to trying to recreate our source images include simulating clouds and water, and generating building geometry. We will be creating the scene geometry in Maya and exporting it to PBRT using the plugin featured here. If time permits, we would also like to simulate the clouds and water, although our main focus will be the sky and lighting model.