Game Projects

Summary

For my Bachelor thesis, I designed, built, programmed, tested and evaluated a monitor-based lightstage. It is used to acquire surface information of an object in order to re-illuminate it digitally.
To achive this, I first built the lightstage as a cube of 6 monitors, then I wrote a server-client-based scanning pipeline in C++ to illuminate the object by specific patterns and capture its reflectance function. These responses are further processed by the second pipeline I created, which extracts the previously mentioned surface information of the object as well as creating the final rendering of the re-illuminated object. The results are realisticly and continuously re-illuminated objects.

Illumination patterns

To illuminate the object I used Spherical Harmonics, which are orthogonal functions on the surface of a sphere which form an orthogonal basis. They are very good for describing spherical illumination and encoding complex spherical functions as a set of individually scaled and rotated spherical harmonics

Source: Producing 3D Audio in Ambisonics - Scientific Figure on ResearchGate. Available
from: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/First-16-spherical-harmonics-with-order-n-and-degreem_fig1_281559396 [accessed 24 Sep, 2021]

Render equation using Ward BRDF

To test the acquired results, I developed a simple renderer based on the Ward-BRDF to distribute digital lights in the scene and relight the object.

Results

The following image displays the rendered diffuse sphere, virtually illuminated from different angles.

Facts (Game)

University

University of Tübingen

Professor

Prof. Hendrik Lensch

Download Thesis (PDF)