Rendering with Natural Light

RNL in Real Time! For SIGGRAPH 2002, ATI is demoing Rendering with Natural Light in Real Time! Their Radeon 9700 card demo and an MPG of it recorded live are at ATI's Radeon 9700 demo web site.

RNL Source now online! For the SIGGRAPH 2001 Course on Image-Based Lighting, we've placed the full Source Files for Rendering with Natural Light online with a step-by-step tutorial on how to render RNL on your own (Unix) computer.

Download the Movie Click here to download Rendering with Natural Light (320 x 240, 30 fps, 20MB, QuickTime using the Sorenson compressor.) This special version of RNL was re-rendered with dense super-sampling on the Berkeley Millennium cluster by Tim Hawkins.

RNL was rendered entirely with image-based lighting: the synthetic objects were illuminated with real light captured in UC Berkeley's eucalyptus grove. The basic technique is described in the following paper:

Paul Debevec. Rendering Synthetic Objects into Real Scenes: Bridging Traditional and Image-Based Graphics with Global Illumination and High Dynamic Range Photography. In SIGGRAPH 98, July 1998.

The RNL lighting environment, as well as the lighting environments from our 1999 film Fiat Lux, are available in the Light Probe Image Gallery.

RNL was mentioned in Animation World Magazine and on Canal +.

In 2001, the RNL light probe appeared as the background of the chameleon-oriented NVIDIA GeForce 3 graphics card demo.

The contributors to Rendering with Natural Light are Kevin Deus, Tim Hawkins, Gregory Chew, David Metzger, Hal Wasserman, and Chris Wright.

There is also a 1600x1200 high-resolution image from Rendering with Natural Light available in TIFF or JPEG.