Rendering Spaces for Architectural Environments

We present a new framework for rendering virtual environments. This framework is proposed as a complete scene description, which embodies the space of all possible renderings, under all possible lighting scenarios of the given scene. In effect, this hypothetical rendering space includes all possible light sources as part of the geometric model. While it would be impractical to implement the general framework, this approach does allow us to look at the rendering problem in a new way. Thus, we propose new representations that are subspaces of the entire rendering space. Some of these subspaces are computationally tractable and may be carefully chosen to serve a particular application. The approach is useful both for real and virtual scenes. The framework includes methods for rendering environments which are illuminated by artificial light, natural light, or a combination of the two models.