Just for the rendering competition I implemented some new features, that reduced the amount of solids (Cylinder instead of triangle meshes in the shape of a cylinder) or reduced the amount of lights (AmbientPointLight that lights all reachable objects with the same intensity).
The Cylinder
Cylinders are used for the supporting pillars around the inner
courtyard. Using thos instead of triangle/ quad-meshes brings the
advantage, that they are really round and can't look edgy.
As well, there is just one solid needed instead of many.
The cylinder class(es) can be found in "rt/solids/".
The AmbientPointLight
In the beginnings of modelling the virtual room, I used several
single point lights to get light into the big dark room.
But with adding more and more solids, the rendering time got more
and more. As we know, each light adds linear time to the scene and
therefore having less lights, would decrease the rendering time drastically.
So I thought - why not having something like the directional light
for rooms - a light that lightens every reachable point with the same
intensity.
The AmbientPointLight class(es) can be found in "rt/lights/".