Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 15

ADAPTATION OF LIGHTING STYLES FROM TRADITIONAL PAINTINGS TO COMPUTER GENERATED SCENES

A Thesis Proposal By Muzammil- Malik

Background and Significance of this study:

The rapid development of Computer Graphics has spurred an ambitious drive towards achieving greater realism in Computer Generated Imagery. Every year, we witness technological and artistic breakthroughs in CG movies and every time the bar is raised higher for the quality of work produced. Watching Shrek for the first time, one might have thought that CG content could never get any better. But we constantly come across more thrilling content each year.

One of the most critical and potentially improvable areas of CG content creation is lighting. The importance of lighting cant be overemphasized. Light is the primary carrier of information. It plays an important role in the perception of any scene. For instance, a cheerful green pasture during a nice sunny day seems like a haunted scary moor during a dark night. Thus, lighting is often used constructively to evoke certain emotions effectively to the viewers in movies and theatrical performances. It has a direct psychological import attached to it which successful film-makers use to their advantage to convey telling stories. Indeed, the motivation behind lighting is a

little more than just making things bright enough for viewers to be able to see things.

Lighting plays a vital role in the image making process. A wonderfully modeled scene with great textures and characters wont live up to it if its not well lit. Lighting means so much things to an image, it can make the very same environment look cheerful, gloomy, scary, lovely, mysterious, and can evoke a wide variety of other feelings depending on how that environment is lit - and if one does it well all this can be done very implicitly (thereby viewers attention would not be on lighting, but the comprehensive look and feel of the scene).

Studying traditional art principles used in photography, cinematography, paintings, etc. is an invaluable way of learning how to create images that tell a story, look believable, evoke the right emotions, and at the same time are aesthetically appealing too. So with 3d graphics, basically the tools used in making images are different; but the underlying principles of image making are inherently the same.

With this motivation, studying works of ancient and contemporary masters of Fine Arts is definitely an important step towards understanding how they lit their wonderful paintings. Once we have a well-informed understanding of their style of lighting, their actual panache and verve it will be much easier for us to recreate that in another medium. So after channeling our study in this direction, we should be able to identify why a John Register painting looks like a John Register painting, why a Jules Breton painting looks like a Jules Breton painting and similarly why a Chris Peters painting has its own characteristic look and feel. Now that raises an argument that we cannot be too assumptive to overrule the premise that some artists are intemperately inspired by some other artists, and so we cannot manifestly differentiate the lighting style in the paintings of the inspirer and the inspired. But that argument lacks strength, because in actuality the inspired artist is regurgitating the lighting style of the artist who inspired him/her. And this is quite exactly what we are intending to do, we are studying the style of artist A and B, and recreating that with the exception of using a different medium i.e., computer generated.

Now we have the question as to what propelled me to choose these three artists - Jules Breton, John Register and Chris Peters. The most authoritative factor influencing my choice was their lighting style. The works of each of the three artists are characterized by a strong sense of lighting in their scenes. Nevertheless, their lighting style is greatly wide-ranging that would enable a viewer to be instantly able to group paintings done by those individual painters without knowing in advance who their painter was.

Jules Breton paintings take you into this world of idyllic bucolic landscapes with trenchant natural outdoor lighting. His paintings portray the lives of ordinary peasants on the French countryside.

Jules Breton - The End of the Working Day, 1886-87

Jules Breton - The Weeders, 1868

John Register paintings on the other hand seem to be lit with lighting from the other end of the spectrum, not literally but actually the subject of his paintings is reclusive urban spaces. His paintings feature highly contrasted (mostly indoors) lighting which hyperbolizes his idea of the growing aloofness and distance between people in the new formed American urban society. In his paintings, one would typically key out city spaces with no human figures and strong lighting coupled with strong shadows.

John Register Phillippes Restaurant

John Register Office, 1983

Chris Peters is a contemporary artist whose paintings mostly feature still life paintings. His still life

paintings are characterized by predominantly saturated colors with high contrast, and his paintings in general have interesting matte surfaces that are characterized by their lack luster look with very low glossiness and vastly spread out highlights, effectively reducing the specular component to negligible.

*
Chris Peters Title Unknown

Chris Peters The Fall

Previous Related Work:

Julie Garcia M.S. Thesis:

Julie Garcia in her MS thesis Creating effective computer generated using traditional film lighting techniques [1] analyzed distinct traditional cinematic styles of three different directors of photography and recreated them in CG.

Cindy Hong M.S. Thesis:


Cindy Hongs thesis titled Lighting Studies: Interpreting Lighting Styles from Tradiotional Media in Computer Generated Imagery [2] was similar to Jule Garcias thesis in that it attempted to digitally recreate four paintings and one still movie image. Her thesis was more inclined towards determining key source of light, understanding the warm/cool colors in the key and the time of the day/year and its effect on lighting.

Similar attempts were made in some other Theses like Ellen Trinhs Cine-anime: Adaptations of realistic lighting styles [3] and Lei Hans Pixel noir: A style for cinematic computer generated lighting [4].

But in all the aforementioned theses, with the exception of one, the final results were still images. The one which does not have still images as final result instead has a very short clip showing lights being turned on, and there is a subtle camera movement this particular thesis is inspired by cinematographic lighting. My thesis on the other hand will be different from all the above in this: I will be imitating lighting style from paintings (which are obviously still) in CG and I will have lights turn on gradually with subtle camera movements. So this will be very intriguing aspect that sets my thesis apart from others by taking a still world from the painting and adding dynamism and movement to it after mimicking that in CG.

Research Questions:

The primary questions addressed in this research: Two paintings each of Jules Breton, John Register and Chris Peters will be selected, and carefully analyzed for their lighting styles. After enough details about their lighting are established, the next step would be to move forward with creating scenes in CG and light them in such a way that they resemble the original paintings. But this lighting study might as well be done after the 3d scenes are constructed inside a CG program as lighting stage is quite independent of modeling stage. As computer renderings are highly computing and time intensive, thrifty exploration of different ways of rendering is essential. Some of the things that will need to be experimented with are Direct or Indirect lighting, number and types of lights (point lights, directional, area, photometric etc.), types and qualities of shadows, renderers, fake global illumination, etc.

Summary of Research Design:

Fundamentally, the research design has been structured based on the aforementioned questions. We can be a little bit liberal in carrying out the lighting study part even in the later part of the research as modeling doesnt really require lighting study to start with.

Study paintings of each of the three artists to identify their Lighting Style

Model 3d scenes based on two paintings for each artist

Render out the scenes

Light and texture the scenes until they look similar to the original paintings

Conclusion:

The proposed research can provide valuable insights into the lighting styles of the two artists and the challenges presented in replicating their style in CG environment. The process might also be generalized to emulate lighting from other art paintings in CG scenes.

Вам также может понравиться