Toward Evaluating the Usefulness of GlobalIllumination for Novices in Lighting Design Tasks.

Thanks to its ability to improve the realism of computer-generated imagery, the use of global illumination has recently become widespread among digital lighting artists. It remains unclear, though, what impact it has on the lighting design workflows, especially for novice users. In this paper we present a user study which investigates the use of global illumination, large area lights, and non-physical fill lights in lighting design tasks, where 26 novice subjects design lighting with these tools.