RENDERING SPACES FOR ARCHITECTURAL ENVIRONMENTS

We present a new framework for rendering virtual environments. This fr amework is proposed as a complete scene description, which embodies th e space of all possible renderings, under all possible lighting scenar ios of the given scene. In effect, this hypothetical rendering space i ncludes all possible light sources as part of the geometric model. Whi le it would be impractical to implement the general framework, this ap proach does allow us to look at the rendering problem in a new way. Th us, we propose new representations that are subspaces of the entire re ndering space. Some of these subspaces are computationally tractable a nd may be carefully chosen to serve a particular application. The appr oach is useful both for real and virtual scenes. The framework include s methods for rendering environments which are illuminated by artifici al light, natural light, or a combination of the two models.