Lighting-grounded Video Generation with Renderer-based Agent Reasoning
Authors: Ziqi Cai, Taoyu Yang, Zheng Chang, Si Li, Han Jiang, Shuchen Weng, Boxin Shi
Organizations: State Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University · National Engineering Research Center of Visual Technology, School of Computer Science, Peking University · OpenBayes Information Technology Co., Ltd. · School of Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence
Diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in video generation, but their controllability remains a major limitation. Key scene factors such as layout, lighting, and camera trajectory are often entangled or only weakly modeled, restricting their applicability in domains like filmmaking and virtual production where explicit scene control is essential. We present LiVER, a diffusion-based framework for scene-controllable video generation. To achieve this, we introduce a novel framework that conditions video synthesis on explicit 3D scene properties, supported by a new large-scale dataset with dense annotations of object layout, lighting, and camera parameters. Our method disentangles these properties by rendering control signals from a unified 3D representation. We propose a lightweight conditioning module and a progressive training strategy to integrate these signals into a foundational video diffusion model, ensuring stable convergence and high fidelity. Our framework enables a wide range of applications, including image-to-video and video-to-video synthesis where the underlying 3D scene is fully editable. To further enhance usability, we develop a scene agent that automatically translates high-level user instructions into the required 3D control signals. Experiments show that LiVER achieves state-of-the-art photorealism and temporal consistency while enabling precise, disentangled control over scene factors, setting a new standard for controllable video generation.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Our data annotation pipeline for LiVER-Real . We process each video to reconstruct its 3D geometry and estimate its HDR environment map. These are then used to render three pixel-aligned lighting representations (Diffuse, Glossy GGX, Rough GGX), which are concatenated to form the final conditioning input.
Figure 3: Pipeline of LiVER. Given a text prompt T , our Scene Agent parses object categories, spatial relations, and coarse geometry to construct an initial 3D scene. The Camera Agent infers a camera trajectory consistent with the described viewpoint and scene semantics, producing the camera condition C . The 3D scene is then rendered through a physically-based renderer to obtain the lighting-grounded scene proxy, including diffuse, glossy GGX, and rough GGX components, forming the scene condition Xcond . These components encode physically meaningful cues such as material response, shading, and reflections. The Lighting condition L , represented by an environment map, provides global illumination cues. The DiT-based video diffusion model integrates all conditions Xcond , C , L and generates a photorealistic video that preserves the scene layout, camera trajectory, and physically accurate lighting behavior.
Method
FVD ↓
FID ↓
CLIP ↑
ATE ↓
RPEt ↓
RPEr ↓
LE ↓
LI ↓
mIoU ↑
CameraCtrl [ 13 ]
48.03
98.29
28.75
2.15
1.39
1.68
0.06
0.03
0.68
MotionCtrl [ 45 ]
63.13
97.21
26.67
3.42
2.03
7.32
0.07
0.04
0.66
Ours †
32.45
42.32
29.62
1.30
0.81
1.16
0.05
0.02
0.86
VideoFrom3D [ 21 ]
36.94
157.89
24.51
17.55
3.85
3.12
0.05
0.03
0.74
Ours
32.56
129.56
30.97
2.48
0.71
0.50
0.04
0.02
0.87
Table 1: Quantitative comparison with state-of-the-art methods. Our method consistently outperforms the baselines. † Only compare first 16 frames.
Figure 4: Qualitative comparison with state-of-the-art controllable video generation models. In each block, each row corresponds to one video, and frames are arranged from left to right in temporal order. The top row shows the results of each comparison method, followed by ours, with the ground truth (GT) shown in the final row.
Figure 5: By manipulating the HDR environment map, our model produces continuous and physically consistent lighting variations. We show the diffuse, glossy, and rough GGX components of the scene proxy (top three rows) and the corresponding synthesized outputs (bottom). Lighting changes are reflected in shading and reflections while geometry and materials remain stable.
Figure 6: Qualitative results of our ablation study.
Method
VQ ↑
SC ↑
CC ↑
LC ↑
CameraCtrl [ 13 ]
4.3%
4.1%
2.2%
6.0%
MotionCtrl [ 45 ]
3.6%
3.6%
1.6%
5.7%
VideoFrom3D [ 21 ]
8.7%
8.9%
24.1%
29.0%
Ours
83.4%
83.3%
72.1%
59.3%
Table 2: Percentage of samples in which each method is selected as the most preferred solution.
Camera control has been extensively studied in conditioned video generation; however, performing precisely altering the camera trajectories while faithfully preserving the video content remains a challenging task. The mainstream approach to achieving precise camera control is warping a 3D representation according to the target trajectory. However, such methods fail to fully leverage the 3D priors of video diffusion models (VDMs) and often fall into the Inpainting Trap, resulting in subject inconsistency and degraded generation quality. To address this problem, we propose DepthDirector, a video re-rendering framework with precise camera controllability. By leveraging the depth video from explicit 3D representation as camera-control guidance, our method can faithfully reproduce the dynamic scene of an input video under novel camera trajectories. Specifically, we design a View-Content Dual-Stream Condition mechanism that injects both the source video and the warped depth sequence rendered under the target viewpoint into the pretrained video generation model. This geometric guidance signal enables VDMs to comprehend camera movements and leverage their 3D understanding capabilities, thereby facilitating precise camera control and consistent content generation. Next, we introduce a lightweight LoRA-based video diffusion adapter to train our framework, fully preserving the knowledge priors of VDMs. Additionally, we construct a large-scale multi-camera synchronized dataset named MultiCam-WarpData using Unreal Engine 5, containing 8K videos across 1K dynamic scenes. Extensive experiments show that DepthDirector outperforms existing methods in both camera controllability and visual quality. Our code and dataset will be publicly available.
Dong-Yu Chen, Yixin Guo, Shuojin Yang +2
BNRist, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University Beijing 100084, China
State-of-the-art video generation models produce remarkable photorealism, but they lack the precise control required to align generated content with specific scene requirements. Furthermore, without an underlying explicit geometry, these models cannot guarantee 3D consistency. Conversely, 3D engines offer granular control over every scene element and provide native 3D consistency by design, yet their output often remains trapped in the "uncanny valley". Bridging this sim-to-real gap requires both structural precision, where the output must exactly preserve the geometry and dynamics of the input, and global semantic transformation, where materials, lighting, and textures must be holistically transformed to achieve photorealism. We present RealMaster, a method that leverages video diffusion models to lift rendered video into photorealistic video while maintaining full alignment with the output of the 3D engine. To train this model, we generate a paired dataset via an anchor-based propagation strategy, where the first and last frames are enhanced for realism and propagated across the intermediate frames using geometric conditioning cues. We then train an IC-LoRA on these paired videos to distill the high-quality outputs of the pipeline into a model that generalizes beyond the pipeline's constraints, handling objects and characters that appear mid-sequence and enabling inference without requiring anchor frames. Evaluated on complex GTA-V sequences, RealMaster significantly outperforms existing video editing baselines, improving photorealism while preserving the geometry, dynamics, and identity specified by the original 3D control.
Dana Cohen-Bar, Ido Sobol, Raphael Bensadoun +5
TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY · REALITY LABS, META · TECHNION
Diffusion Transformers have recently achieved strong performance in video generation, yet controlling scene geometry under viewpoint changes and camera motion remains challenging. In this work, we revisit the role of positional encoding in video diffusion transformers and show that it provides a useful spatial bias for geometry-aware control. Specifically, if reference tokens are encoded according to their projected locations in the target view, the denoising model is encouraged to retrieve content from position aligned regions of the input video. Building on this observation, we introduce a geometry-aware cross-attention mechanism that enables target video latent tokens to attend to structured context tokens derived from reference images or frames. To establish correspondence between the reference content and the target camera trajectory, we equip the context tokens with a projected positional encoding scheme that combines target-view 2D reprojection with depth-aware disambiguation. At the same time, we preserve the original spatiotemporal positional encoding of the generated video latent, allowing geometric guidance to be injected while maintaining consistency with the video model's native latent structure. The resulting framework provides a simple and effective approach for controllable video generation. It improves spatial controllability in viewpoint-dependent editing tasks, including camera re-trajectory, novel-view video synthesis, and geometry-aware video editing, while preserving the generative prior of the underlying video diffusion model. The code is available at: https://github.com/MTLab/PE-Field.
Yunpeng Bai, Haoxiang Li, Qixing Huang
University of Texas at Austin, USA · Pixocial Technology, USA