Abstract
The appearance of objects comes from the interaction of scene lighting and surface materials, whose careful definition is necessary to achieve the remarkable sophistication of today's synthetic imagery. Currently, appearance design is one of the remaining roadblocks for a ubiquitous use of computer-generated imagery, since slow user feedback and cumbersome user interfaces make the process significantly time consuming for expert designers, and beyond the reach of novices.

In this talk, I will quickly summarize our recent results in rendering accurate lighting for complex environments where we achieve interactivity by developing new approximation algorithms that take advantage today's commodity hardware architectures to bring artists' workflow from an offline to a fully interactive process. I will then show results from algorithms that build on this interactivity to support intuitive user interfaces for appearance design that drastically simplify the time required for designing appearance.