Concept

The picture depicts a simple scene with a bear performing in front of an audience in a circus tent.
Initially, my intention was to render a contrasting scene which shows a happy audience enjoying the circus show, oblivious to how these animals are tortured during training and lead miserable lives. On the other hand the same scene would have depicted a tortured, starved and lonely bear, confined to a cage barely larger than its own body, but that part of the scene is blurred, and is only visible through the lens of kindness. Due to time constraints and my group partner dropping the course at the very end, I could not realize the other part of the scene, which would have completed the picture.
The scene was conceptualized in Maya® 3D student version. The .obj files and associated .mtl texture files after necessary pre-processing (rotations, translation, scaling) were imported into raytracer. The features implemented in the ray tracer during the semester were utilized for this project. The reference list for 3D model of bear and other textures used is mentioned under the References Tab. The scene takes approximately <=2hrs to render with 20 samples. I worked alone for the rendering competition.

Different Iterations of Scene