Googling for research papers on Technology behind VFX, gave this usefull links. This is first part of my technology explorations and Future.
Lighting in most real scenes is complex, coming from a variety of sources including area lights and large continuous lighting distributions like skylight. But current graphics hardware only supports point or directional light sources. One reason is the lack of simple procedural formulas for general lighting distributions. Instead, an integration over the upper hemisphere must be done for each pixel.
We present such a simple formula for diffuse objects, i.e. for the irradiance. The key to our approach is the rapid computation of an analytic approximation to the irradiance environment map. For rendering, we demonstrate a simple procedural algorithm that runs at interactive frame rates, and is amenable to hardware implementation. No texture-mapping is required for the irradiance with our approach.
Read more on this research papper. more From Ravi Ramamoorthi
Filed under: MINDS BEHIND VFX, TECHNOLOGY, VFX, vfx demo reel, BERKLEY UNIVERSITY, COMPUTER GRAPHICS LABORATORY, HDRI, IMAGE BASED LIGHTING, IRRADIANCE MAPS, PAT HANRAHAN, RAVI RAMAMOORTHI, VFX JUNKIE, VFX TECHNOLOGY
VFX JUNKIE 