Escher's Room

Rendering Competition 2022/2023: Image by Simon Döring

Find Out More

Downloads

2100x1090 500x260

Escher's Room

The title refers to the famous dutch artist M. C. Escher ho lived during the last century. The image itself is a direct reference to his drawing Three Spheres II.Eschers original image depicts three spheres which are next to each other. One sphere is made out of glass, the next one is a mirror, and the last is made out of stone. Now, the interesting aspect of this image is that Escher himself is currently drawing these three spheres, and you can see him and his drawing inside the reflection of the mirror sphere. So, while drawing the sphere, the reflection changes and Escher has to anticipate this. The goal of my image is to show what happens after Escher finishes his work and leaves his house. When Escher leaves his office, you can, through the window, see him walking, which means that his drawing has to change again, but how can Escher find the final state of his artwork if it is always changing? Furthermore, his whole office seems to be a little bit strange. Why can you see his chandelier if you look at the back wall? I think we have to change our perspective to find this out!


It's all a question of perspective

Let use change our perspect to better understand how this image works. In the following, you can find some low-quality versions of the image where changed the point of view.



Back and Bottom

Let's take a look at the back wall of the room. We see a strange window-like structure having the shape of the Mandelbrot set. It seems like a warp portal with this strange texture. Actually, it is a warp portal! It directly warps you through the floor of the room. This is why we can see the ceiling and the bottom part of the chair and table. Escher himself used something similar in his artwork Other World. This effect is archived by having a plane that sets a new origin and direction for each ray that hits its surface. In some sense, this acts as an orthographic camera..




Left and Back

Similar to the previous wall, this wall warps our rays to the back side of the room which is why we can see the front side. One interesting aspect is the shape of this warp portal. It is actually the same Julia function which we computed during the first assignment. Furthermore, this Julia fraction is actually transparent. This effect is achieved by computing iterating the Julia function to decide whether a point diverges (i.e. the value becomes too large). The number of steps determines how much light passes through this portal at every single point.




Julia and Tables

Speaking of Julia sets. These fractals are everywhere, especially on walls. However, to combine the fractals with the walls, we have to define a new material which is multiplied by a texture (the fractal). In this image, we can also see that there are two table plates. The top one is without self-emission, and the bottom one is with self-emission. This is important for the warping since there aren't any light sources underneath the table.




An infinite drawing








Some more details

  • The chandelier is a 3D Koch-snowflake
  • There is a pen next to the drawing
  • The windows are strached version of the Menger sponge fractal
  • The room has no floor
  • The stone sphere is the moon
  • I applied perlin noise to the walls

Statistics

Resolution

Faces

Samples

Rendering Time

2100x1090

38,490

1500

4h 6m