Photorealistic rendering for the Prophet Mosque in 3D Media: Issues and solutions

Abstract

We present our photorealistic rendering experiment for the Prophet mosque’s architectural heritage reconstruction in Madinah, Saudi Arabia. The rendering output is in 3D media which can be used for animation and V/AR. Prophet Mosque is a significant icon and heritage of Islam because it no longer has evidence of the old memories, and it was fully sealed and protected. We created a model based on existing media like textual descriptions, pictures, and scholarly discussion to visualise this. Our main goal is to produce a photorealistic result with the least computational power and time. As we all know, making photorealistic objects is a lengthy and challenging process. In this paper, we identify the challenges and propose the configuration and workflow of the model built by exploring various settings and parameters of the state-of-the-art rendering approach. We chose Vray and 3DS Max as our platforms for this experiment. Our evaluation method includes several challenging processes like texturing, lighting, rendering, and modelling. Each of these processes has its challenges and solution. The result shows how important it is to organise the project pipeline and control the rendering parameters from the beginning until its final stage to get the maximum output using minimal efforts. Finally, we outlined several guidelines to achieve this.