Visual media, such as film and computer games, often require the need for the realistic rendering of synthetic objects. Image Based Lighting (IBL) techniques provide methods for applying measured real-world lighting to synthetic objects, making them appear believable within their environment. Given this ability, IBL techniques have drawn interest within many industries involved in visual effects, however its adoption has been mostly confined to implementations of its original method.

Traditional IBL, as it is now known, only requires the measurement of light at one position in space to provide the data for illuminating all synthetic objects in the scene. This single requirement places large constraints on the complexity of illumination within a scene by assuming there are negligible changes in lighting within the extent of the local environment. Due to this, lighting features such as shadows, that exhibit a spatial frequency greater than zero, cannot be represented within this limited model.

Modern research into IBL techniques aim to resolve this problem by presenting methods to capture, process, and render spatially varying illumination. This thesis builds upon recent research into densely sampled light probe sequences and considers its use in a production environment. Its objective is to present set of tools for processing and rendering this data for use with the commercial software packages Maya, a modelling and animation application, and mental ray, a high-fidelity renderer.