Concept

I had multiple Aquariums in the past and I always felt calm and peaceful while watching the fish. I could go on and watch for hours and forget all the stress and problems I have. For this competition, I wanted to capture this feeling of peace and calmness induced by watching an Aquarium.

Work

First I build the Aquarium out of quads:

Then I improved lighting and added some detail:

After that, I added some more detail and added an environment for the Aquarium:

Lastly, I added more detail to the environment and added some additional fish:

The final image is rendered in 1920x1440 with a sampling rate of 150. It took ~7.5h to render completly.

Features

I showcase the following features of my ray tracer:

Point Lights

Area Lights

Image Textures

Lambertian Material

Glass Material

I use a Split-In-The-Median BVH as my Acceleration Structure and OpenMP for Parallelization.

Final Images

480x360

1920x1440

References

Fish Model + Texture

Brain Coral Model + Texture

Rock Model + Texture

Wallpaper Texture

Aquatic Plant Model + Texture

Author

Alexander Mohr