Final Render

Solved Shot by Karl Pham

Theme Chaos in Harmony

A solved rubik's cube shows the concept of "chaos in harmony", as there is only one solved state out of over 43 quintillion possible. The possible unorder is portrayed by the multiple scramled cubes in the surrounding. Their different locations, rotations and scales enhance the chaos. Even the scrambled reflection of the solved cube reflects more chaos.(pun intended) However there are things that are not random, the unusual quadratic 1:1 aspect ratio for example resembles the face of one side of the cube. Further the cubes are spread evenly, such that there's roughly about one cube visible in every 3x3 grid of the image. Everything perfectly aranged for a perfect shot, a "Solved Shot".

Features

The following features have been implemented. The left image when comparing two images, is always the first one/the one on the left.

Halton Sampling

The Halton sampling is a low-discrepancy sequence which can be used to reduce noise.
Halton could not load Halton could not load
with 256 samples per pixel
You see less noise, but some artifacts instead. Artifacts will go away for higher number of samples. The Halton sampling which was implemented, was the fully deterministic pattern. So not sure how good the quality would have been with owen scramble.

Denoising

Probably not really important anymore, as the Halton sampling reduces the noise. You probably can't tell the difference.
could not could not
"noisy" image was rendered with 512 samples per pixel
Zoomed in you can see some slight differences, but not really worth mentioning. And even with less samples there isn't really visible noise, just more artifacts from the Halton sampling.

Thinlens

Probably the most noticeable feature in the renderer.(So no need to put additional images) The thinlens helps to keep the solved cube to be more in focus, as some of the rest gets blurred. Also it adds another layer of "randomness" to the unsolved cubes, as they have varying distances the blur is different for each of them. Furthermore it adds some more realism to the shot.

Area Light

Area lights allow some more realistic soft shadows. However the most visible shadow in the scene has some Halton sampling artifacts. Modelling them with a emissive shape, that requires to be hit, is very noisy for smaller area lights.
That being said the sky which is seen in the mirror is modeled with a emmisive plane with a image texture.(So kind of like a windowed environment map) As the main purpose is the sky being visible in the mirror, which has a single outgoing direction bsdf.

Shading Normal

Shading normals allow to add more details without increasing the complexity of the underlying geometry.
Here the wall and the ground have besides a image texture also some subtle shading normals. On the wall you probably can not tell, because of the blur from the thinlens camera.

Assets

All assets are taken from Blenderkit: cube, wall material mirror scene