We created a scene where some brave people take the leap of faith and leave everything behind, to journey across space in search of new horizons.
This is the list of features we implemented to give life to our scene:
Thinlens Camera
Halton Sampling
Denoising
Tonemapping
We didn't want to leave any realism on the table and implemented an additional albedo integrator to feed to Intel's Open Image Denoising (along with the noisy image and the normal map render). This improved the quality of our render even further.
We wanted to perfectly capture the captain's screen as he looked into the abyss of space. Hence we implemented a thinlens camera model, which would more realistically capture this view.
A good render shouldn't rely on random chance. So our sampler was upgraded to use the Halton sequence to achieve the best possible results.
It didn't feel right that after implementing such a powerful renderer, we would be limited by trivial tonemapping. Therefore we implemented 2 different tonemapping techniques: local and global Reinhard algorithms. Their performance was sped up using multithreading and parallel processing of the pixels in blocks.
