Neo Night

The Idea

I wanted to challenge myself by not using external models or textures at all. So instead of building a scene in Blender or looking for object files online, I was thinking about how I could get away with generating the entire scene in code. It obviously had to be a minimalistic scene that was feasible to create in a procedural way. One day I was listening to some future synth music and saw some album covers. They all used simple geometry and cool lighting effects that I felt able to recreate. That's how I got inspired to use this as the theme for my scene.

Highlights

Here is everything I did to create this scene:

The floor is just a bunch of triangles next to each other. For the grid-lines I made a simple texture (almost the same as the checkerboard texture). I added a mirror material to make it look more interesting. The mountain-like structure on the right uses hard-coded height values.

The houses for the city are quads of different sizes, each with a slightly off-set position to create the illusion of depth. The lights are tiny quads with a bright material.

The sky in the background is just an infinite plane. I made a gradient texture for it and decorated it with a big area light and some small stars to make it look like a sky. Yes, the position of the stars is hard-coded.

The only purpose of the floating cube is to look nice. It's supposed to be just glass. However, I combined the glass with a white texture. It's barely noticeable but makes the cube slightly more prominent.

Additionally Implemented Features

• Grid texture as seen on the floor (in rt/textures/grid.{h,cpp})
• Gradient texture as seen in the sky (in rt/textures/gradient.{h,cpp})
• Multithreaded renderer (in rt/renderer_threaded.cpp)

Statistics

• Number of primitives: 1972
  Since it's hard to generate complex geometry procedurally, I wanted to create an interesting scene using only a few simple shapes. Therefore the number of primitives is not too impressive.
• Number of lights: 6
  I played around with more lights, but removed them in the end. Since it's supposed to be a scene at night, I wanted to keep the general tone rather dark. Adding more lights would therefore mess with the atmosphere by making some areas too bright.
• Number of samples per pixel: 1000
  The scene setup is rather minimalistic. Hence, I had the capacity to use a lot of samples to improve the image quality. This has the nice effect of making the scene look very clean.
• Time to render: 34 minutes on an i5-6600
  That translates to roughly 1 primary ray per micro-second. I got an easy speedup by making the renderer multithreaded. Since all rays are independent from each other, they can be rendered with all available threads without the need for any synchronization.

Creator

Acknowledgements