A cold winter day, a warm house, the presents under the tree. It's christmas!
Created by Filippo Garosi and Abdul Rafay
Find Out What It Took!of rendering time, 1920x1080
There was only one week left and we didn't have any idea of what to create. A legendary tutor suggested one of us to look for a closed scene, to emphasize light interactions and really showcase what our raytracer can do. From the suggestion, and the good time I spent at home during Christmas, stemmed the idea of a scene with a Christmas tree full of colorful lights, and the cozy feeling of being in a warm house in a winter night.
With no prior modeling experience, we were confused about where to start from, so again our legendary tutor saved us and suggested using Blender. After a quick and easy 1-hour tutorial, I was ready to model! (only one of us did the modeling). Most of the objects have been collected from the internet(the chairs, the socks, the wall clock, the room lamp, the presents, the star and the tree, links at the end of the page!), but the remaining things have been proudly modeled!
Prime protagonists of our scene are the light sources, all of which but the fireplace ones are AreaLight lightsources, which allow for smoother and more natural shadows. For the fireplace in particular, 2 point light sources were used, placed near the logs to simulate a faint fire. For the Christmas balls, a new ColoredConductorMaterial(rt/materials/coloredconductor.h) was used, which adds the possibility of multiplying the reflectance of the material by a color, roughly implementing a wavelength dependent reflectance. Modeling a nice christmas scarf was a difficult task, so we opted for a metal tube placed around the tree. Other minor things use a ConductorMaterial, the rest use mainly diffuse materials in the form of PhongMaterials. Texture mapping was done in Blender, as it was the most time efficient and accurate, thus only TriangleMappers were used.
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