Makoto Okabe

 

 

[ Japanese ]

Home

Biography

Research

Publications

Resume

 

 

 

 

 

 

Light Shower: A Poor Man’s Light Stage

Built with an Off-the-shelf Umbrella and Projector

 

Makoto Okabe

Kenshi Takayama

Takashi Ijiri

Takeo Igarashi

The University of Tokyo

  

Galileo’s Tomb light environment

 

A high specular object (sunglasses) with Grace Cathedral light environment

 

Each figure shows a composite of an actor in the Galileo's Tomb, Eucalyptus Grove or Grace Cathedral lighting environment. We created this composite using Adobe Premiere Pro. We applied the blue screen key effect for creating a matte image and manually adjusted the tone curves of RGB to adjust the appearance. One of the strengths of using a projector over a diode array is that a highly specular object can be used for a composite. Bottom figure shows a composite of an actor wearing sunglasses in the Grace Cathedral lighting environment.

 

Abstract

 

Compositing an actor or real-world object into a virtual background is a powerful and widely used tool in movie and TV production. To create a natural composite, it is necessary to maintain photometric consistency between the foreground object and the background environment. Various light stage systems have been developed to achieve this goal. One problem with previous systems is that the systems involved are very expensive and time-consuming to build. We propose an inexpensive light stage system, Light Shower, which consists of an off-the-shelf projector and a white umbrella. The projector projects an image onto the white umbrella, which creates environment light for a human face or a real object inside the umbrella.

 

News

 

  • June 11, 2009: Initial project webpage.

 

Paper

 

  • SIGGRAPH 2007 Sketches [PDF]

 

Supplementary materials

 

  • Supplementary Video [mp4]

 

 

 

References

 

  • Makoto Okabe, Kenshi Takayama, Takashi Ijiri, Takeo Igarashi, “Light Shower: A Poor Man's Light Stage Built with an Off-the-shelf Umbrella and Projector”, DVD publication at SIGGRAPH 2007 Sketches.