Radiance-Based Blender Add-On for Physically Accurate Rendering of Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Despite the Cultural Heritage and Computer Graphics communities are increasingly joining forces to strengthen their collaboration, the study of how light interacts with monuments (e.g. weathering the surfaces or affecting the visitors' experience) is still an open problem in cultural heritage. A significant limitation is the lack of easy-to-use, open-source, physically-accurate tools allowing cultural heritage experts to perform lighting simulations on the increasing collection of 3D reconstructions. In this work, we present an open-source Blender add-on to facilitate such simulations. The add-on allows art historians to configure the properties (materials, lights, and camera) of the simulation, and uses as rendering back-end the Radiance software, a validated physically accurate light simulation tool. Our tool lowers the entry barrier for the use of a highly accurate but rather complex (command-based) tool for lighting studies in cultural heritage monuments.