The building
Building the scene took ages, but everything is handmade!
Modeling everything myself was very important to me. At the beginning I even thought, I could model everything in code, but very soon I found out the given the resources, such as the limited rendering time of 12 hours or the time until the project hand in, I had to cut some things.
At some point, I reached out to Blender for modeling rather difficult geometries. It took some time, but thanks to google and youtube I figured out pretty fast, how to model things.
One of the things I modeled in Blender was the water surface.
Taking a plane-mesh, scaling and translating it, then sudividing
and triangulating it for better resolution and that I can load it
with smooth triangles. After that I added a cloud texture for
the displacement.
And as water is transparent,
later in the cpp code, I added glas as a material. The pool-wall texture
itself, as well as the rainbow-ordered lights in the pool make the water
seem like water. Here on the right you can see the first water test.
A huge discoball was supposed to hang from the roof in the middle of the
inner courtyard. But as we limited our ray tracer to iterate just over all
lightsources and not integrate over the whole upper hemisphere for light
income, this wouldn't have no effect.
After all, the mirrored surface made the whole courtyard look a bit crappy,
so I decided not to take the in Blender modeled discoball.
The original idea was to put at least some plants around the pool, such as
palm trees. Unfortunately, due to the limited render time, I had to cut them out
as they rised the rendering time exponentially with around 50 thousand triangles
each.
It also left a mistery why I was not able to put some textures on it - or
were they just so detailed that one couldn't see the difference?
Just as the palmtrees, the original idea included a whirlpool at the back end
of the swimming pool, where the hat water could drop into the pool.
Due to beauty aspects I also left it out.
Entering the entry hall through its huge, double-sided wood door,
looking onto two round stairways leading upwards into the second floor.
This is what we are thinking of, when thinking about old villas.
But this one is different! Having a 6 meter wide straight staircase leading into
the second floor, allows kids to have matress races down! This is so fun!!
Well this is it! You can find out more here.