Dead... Inside

To come up with an idea for this theme, we decided to go the philosophical route. The song "The Line" by twenty one pilots also played a role in conception of this idea. We played around with multiple philosophical themes but could only come to consensus to draw inspiration from the moment of genesis, the creation of Adam.

Rendered on our very own Blunder(Yes, Blunder), the scene shows a celestial being(skeleton) and a human. The celestial being, as a symbol of ultimate harmony, does not reject the chaos it observes. Instead, it recognizes chaos as a necessary counterpart that gives harmony its meaning and existence. The celestial being’s serene, harmonious presence doesn’t diminish the chaotic human life but acknowledges it as vital to the cosmos. The human’s chaotic life might seem disordered, but from the celestial perspective, it contributes to the overall harmony of existence.

The celestial being stands as a reminder that chaos, when viewed from a higher perspective, is not disruptive but an integral part of creating a harmonious whole. The human represents the chaos in the harmony that this higher being has attained. This is Chaos in Harmony: a dynamic interplay where the two forces are forever intertwined, giving life depth, meaning, and beauty. Also, that the butterflies existing in a normal garden would represent harmony but move them to an unexpected location like outer space and suddenly it is chaos.

The human figure reaches towards the celestial figure, which mirrors the gesture. This mirroring creates a sense of harmony, yet the stark contrast between the lower and the higher dimensional being introduces chaos into the symmetry. The skeleton is both familiar and unsettling—a representation of mortality embedded within the continuity of life. This scene does not simply present chaos and harmony as two separate forces in conflict; rather, it shows how chaos is woven into harmony itself, much like entropy is an inherent part of the universe. Another name for this scene was Point of convergence but Dead.. Inside just felt right.

The tip of the human's finger can be seen to start glowing similar to the celestial being which serves as a visualization of the two beings being the same.

The major challenges we faced were essentially bringing our idea to life in blender with only free assets. Free character models that are rigged and look just the way we want are rare. We also faced issues with rendering hair for the selected model so to avoid rendering hair at all we put a helmet on that guy(the initial idea was to get a astronaut asset to replace it but no free asset fit the bill.)

Another challenge was the bloom postprocessing. Extending the postprocess class and integrating it into the scene file was difficult. Translating the bloom algorithm into our implementation took time; we referenced PBRT and used a test image for validation. Creating an albedo integrator was unclear initially, but we resolved it by modifying the core code. We were unsure about uploading OIDN as a precompiled third-party library to the cloud.

For normal shading, incorrect UV mapping caused mismatches in test cases, which we fixed. Rectangle shading errors arose from transformation issues affecting the shading frame.

Area lighting did not work initially until we figured out that we were transforming the frame twice in src/instance.cpp .

Getting textures to work straight out of the box didn't work at all so we had to cut off a lot of nodes in Blender shading in order to make it simple eough for it to render in our renderer.

We also planned on having volumetric rendering in order to render a homogenous mist but unfortunately that didn't work. An attempt was definitely made.

To achieve the break things feature we created a Lambertian_break which ignores the wo check that we previously did and this results in the increased glow for our skeleton and lights whereas increasing the intensity of these lights simply whitens the complete image.

Please refer to the commit named "finals week or final week" for the latest changes

Technical Marvels

Feature Visualizations