Toward Evaluating the Usefulness of GlobalIllumination for Novices in Lighting Design Tasks

Abstract

Thanks to its ability to improve the realism of computer-generated imagery, the use of global illumination has recently become widespread among digital lighting artists. It remains unclear, though, what impact it has on the lighting design workflows, especially for novice users. In this paper we present a user study which investigates the use of global illumination, large area lights, and non-physical fill lights in lighting design tasks, where 26 novice subjects design lighting with these tools. The collected data suggest that global illumination is not significantly harder to control for novice users that direct illumination, and when given the possibility, most users opt to use it in their designs. The use of global illumination together with large area lights leads to simpler lighting setups with fewer non-physical fill lights. Interestingly, global illumination does not supersede fill lights: users still include them into their globally illuminated lighting setups. We believe that our results will find use in the development of lighting design tools for non-expert users.

Analyzing Interfaces and Workflows for Light Field Editing

“…Procedure: Twenty paid subjects (6 female, 14 male) took part in the experiment. This is consistent with the number of subjects typically used in other similar statistical user studies, which usually range between two and 30 [24], [26], [27], [33]. Each subject used each of the four interfaces for all tasks, in random order to avoid possible learning effects.…”

“…All these works focus on the particular editing tools; in contrast, we concern ourselves with the interaction required by the user, involving both the interface used, and the workflows followed by the users. b) Interfaces and workflows: Many different interfaces and workflows have recently been explored for a wide range of applications, including authoring of 3D models [20], freeform design of objects [21], drawing lines to depict shapes [22], facial animation [23], sketching 3D surfaces [24], lighting design [25], [26], material editing [27], [28], icon selection [29], style similarity [30], [31], or simulation of cloth [32], to name a few. Closer to our approach, Santoni et al [33] presented a statistical analysis of 3D digital sculpting.…”

SculptStat: Statistical Analysis of Digital Sculpting Workflows

“…The idea of analyzing workflows is certainly not new and the literature provides many examples supporting such interest, especially in fields close to computer graphics and humancomputer interaction. For example, [Bae et al 2008;Cole et al 2008] investigates how people draw lines, [Schmidt et al 2009] discusses how to sketch 3d surfaces, [Karlík et al 2014;Kerr and Pellacini 2009;Kerr and Pellacini 2010;Jarabo et al 2014] quantitatively evaluate the efficiency of several interface paradigms for lighting, material editing and light fields. In general though, all these works focus on studies that answer specific design questions.…”

State of the Art in Artistic Editing of Appearance, Lighting and Material

“…To measure their effectiveness, Kerr and Pellacini [KP09] established a user study methodology used to determine the effectiveness of the various interfaces relative to one another. This methodology has been used in many subsequent studies in appearance editing [KP09, KP10, OKKP12, KRG*14, JMB*14]. We have summarized briefly the results of these findings before.…”