Light Stages 2 & 3
I spent two years at USC's Institute for Creative Technologies as a producer in Dr. Paul Debevec’s computer graphics research lab. I contributed to several projects there, but the most exciting has got to be helping build and test his famous light stages.
Light Stage 2 featured thirty bright strobe lights on a ten foot semicircular arm which rotated to capture detailed facial reflectance in just eight seconds.
Light Stage 3 featured 156 RGB LED lights mounted on a geodesic dome surrounding an actor, driven by images of virtual sets to light actors appropriately for realistic composites. This is one of the first examples of the virtual production stage technology famously used in The Mandalorian and Gravity. This makes it possible to use image-based lighting techniques so that you can realistically composite human actors into computer-generated sets.
Paul made this video to describe the project. He also wrote a nice summary on his website.
The paper was published in Siggraph 2002 proceedings and presented on the main stage to about 800 people on July 26, 2002.
Light Stage 3: Surrounding Actors with LEDs to Light them with Images of Virtual Sets. Paul Debevec, Andreas Wenger, Chris Tchou, Andrew Gardner, Jamie Waese, and Tim Hawkins, SIGGRAPH 2002 Conference Papers Talk, July 26, 2002.
Read the paper here.