Interactive lighting of effects using point clouds in "Bolt"

Integrating effects into an environment is often a challenging task. This is especially true when the light source is a dynamically changing organic shape such as a lick of flame against a wall of smoke or glowing embers wrapping around a character. Typically, this illumination can be faked with a large number of artistically placed animated lights. However, this often takes time and experimentation to get a pleasing and plausible result. We created a pipeline that is flexible and allows us to generate interactive light from any environmental effect that we would create.