Fiat Lux features a variety of dynamic objects realistically rendered into real environments, including St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.The geometry, appearance, and illumination of the environments were acquired through digital photography and augmented with synthetic objects to create the animation.

Fiat Lux draws its imagery from the life of Galileo Galilei (1564—1642) and his conflict with the church. When he was twenty, Galileo discovered the principle of the pendulum by observing a swinging chandelier while attending mass. This useful timing device quickly set into motion a series of other important scientific discoveries. As the first to observe the sky with a telescope, Galileo made a number of discoveries supporting the Copernican theory of the solar system. As this conflicted with church doctrine, an elderly Galileo was summoned to Rome where he was tried, convicted, forced to recant, and sentenced to house arrest for life.Though honorably buried in Florence, Galileo was not formally exonerated by the church until 1992. Fiat Lux presents an abstract interpretation of this story using artifacts and environments from science and religion.
The objects in Fiat Lux are synthetic, but the environments and the lighting are real. The renderings are a computed simulation of what the scenes would actually look like with the synthetic objects added to the real environments. The image-based lighting techniques we used represent an alternative to traditional compositing methods, in which the lighting on the objects is specified manually.
The environments were acquired in Florence and Rome. To record the full range of illumination, we used high dynamic range photography, in which a series of exposures with varying shutter speeds is combined into a single linear-response radiance image.