In the beginning we were just goofing around in blender until one of us said to model a room so we did and
then kind of just stuck with it. Since we study computer science the room had to include a desk with a computer.
The windows don't quite fit into this concept since we all know computer scientists sit in their basement the entire day,
but we wanted to show off glass with it's reflection in the scene.
How the scene was built
Most of the models for this scene are relatively simplistic and were modeled by us directly in blender where we put together most of the scene.
We exported the scene as OBJ and imported it into our ray tracer and added a few objects manually in code.
Image highlights
Portal:
The most important part of our scene is probably the portal on our monitor.
Instead of simply showing an image on the monitor, we thought why shouldn't we show the scene itself on it again.
Then we had the idea to use a portal as in the video game Portal for that purpose.
Therefore we implemented portals into our raytracer. They work quite similar to glass or mirror materials,
but instead of just changing the ray direction they also change the ray origin, to the point where your second portal should be.
Blue glass sphere:
Another small highlight of our scene is the small blue glass sphere hanging in front of the right window, with its reflection in the window behind it.
For the blue glass we used a glass, where the refracted rays get a blue color instead of transmitting all the light.
The Walls:
To give our scene a bit more authenticity, we wanted to have an ingrain wallpaper on our walls, instead of a simple white texture.
Therefore we modeled the Wall with a constant white color and an additional bumpmap, which was created from an image of a wallpaper.
The Chair:
We didn't wanted to model a chair for our scene, because it would be quite complex to model a good looking chair in blender,
but we also didn't wanted to use a model from the Internet.
So instead we used a relatively simple structure like this oloid-like shape as a chair, on which you can sit quite good according to experience.
Additional features
Portals:
As described above, a portal can be found on the monitor. Niklas implemented the first prototype of portals, while Dominik implemented the final version used in the image.
The implementation can be found in
