The idea for this scene has been inspired by my love for the anime Sailor Moon, my admiration for shiny things, and my love for bright, happy colors.
I had three focal points that I wanted to successfully implement in my scene:
The entire scene has been modeled in Blender. The heart model is curtesy of Donitz on blendswap.com, the moon and star I have modeled completely from scratch.
The implementation of the entire scene can be found in main/a_scene.cpp.
I have first started instancing all textures and materials that I would need in the scene.
The heart, moon and star are the lambertian material because I liked the smooth look the material has and I wanted nothing to distract from the flashy colors.
The underground and walls feature the fuzzy mirror material to give the scene some dimension while keeping it light and dreamy.
The heart, star and moon get loaded seperately to be able to give them their individual materials.
Then, the room gets loaded in the same manner.
Above the heart and moon, I place spotlights to illuminate the scene relatively evenly without overexposing areas.
Additionaly, I add a pointlight above the star to soften the lighting a bit.
The lights all have a soft, pastel yellow color to give the image a warmly lit feel.
The seperate elements then get added to a bounding volume hirarchy implemented in the lecture to make use of the indexing of said structure.
Rendering the scene is possible at only 6 samples per pixel because it does not contain any immensely complicated materials or structures that would require a higher sampling rate.
Lastly, the parts of the image that do not get any light are implemented to not be black, but dark purple to take out the harshness that black shadows would bring into the scene.
This is done by simply changing the recursive ray tracing integrator to not declare the color of the pixel as black in the beginning of the shading process, but as the aforementioned dark purple.