3D Previsualization Using a Computational Photography Camera

During movie production, movie directors use previsualization tools to convey the movie visuals as they see them in their minds eye. Traditional methods of previsualization include hand-drawn sketches, storyboards and still photographs. Recently, video game engines have been used for previsualization so that once the movie set is modeled, scene lighting, geometry, textures and various scene elements can be changed interactively and the effects of many potential changes can be previewed quickly. The use of video games for previsualization involves manually modeling the movie set by artists to create a digital version, which is expensive. We envision that a computational photography camera can be used for capturing images of a physical set from which a model of the scene can be automatically generated. A wide range of possible changes can be explored interactively and previewed on-set including scene geometry and textures. Since our vision is large, we focus initially on an initial prototype (a computational photography camera and previsualization algorithms), which enable scene lighting to be captured, inferred, manipulated and new lights applied (relighting). Evaluations of our light previsualization prototype shows low photometric error rates and encouraging feedback from experts.