Details
There are not many elements that constitute my image, but I have tried to pay a lot of attention to smaller details.
In this section, I would like to give you some overview over the work that went into creating this image.
Long story short, my entire composition (except for the ship) is just noise.
- The backdrop is an environment map consisting of a gradient from orange to blue with two layers of noise on top (dark clouds and bright clouds). There's also some high frequent thresholded noise to model stars.
- The terrain uses noise as heightmap which I filtered to be below sea-level in the center of the frame and above sea-level at the edges. I wrote a kD-tree inspired traversal routine to be able to render the terrain efficiently.
- The water is an infinite plane with glass material. For the bump mapping I apply to this plane I use - you guessed it - perlin noise (but there is also some equations that simulate a water trail behind the ship). I have extended my SampleReflectance struct to make it possible to dampen light exponentially as it passes through a medium. This allows me to tint everything below the water blue.
- The sun is a sphere (with emitting Lambertian material). The primary light for my scene is an area light right in front of it. There is only one additional light in my scene (a point light far above the terrain) which serves as fill light.
- The ship is about the only thing in my scene not made out of noise. It is a lovely model of the HMS victory, a 250 year old ship that used to be one of the flagships of the Royal Navy.
- The bevy of seagulls is procedurally generated from a sphere and six triangles which are non-uniformly scaled using the instancing feature of my renderer. It is not very detailed, but helps establish a sense of motion in my composition.
- As post-processing I do some vignetting (darkening of the corners) and render a procedurally generated sun-flare. I also add a bit of bloom (a soft glow for highlights) so that the image looks more inviting.
I also experimented with adding other elements to my scene but decided that it would become to overcrowded this way
so I sticked to the basics. For more details, take a look at the screenshots below.
