Scene description

The initial scene idea was to make a 3D cave with mystical elements inside. Having the mystical element as center idea of scene, gradually scene was finalized as a portal between our real world and mystical world. The rendered image depicts dusk scene in a barren desert with sand dunes in background. It has a secret gateway which leads to a mystical cave having "Yggdrasil", also known as Tree of life in Norse mythology.

Modelling

The scene was created using a 3D Graphics Software, Blender 3.4. The tree is a freely available 3D model imported in .obj format. The desert, sand dunes, cave, gateway, sky, cave floor and glowing orbs on tree were modeled by me. Desert sand was modelled by subdividing cube bottom face and then applying displacement to them. The sand dunes were created by subdividing the plane and applying proportional editing to form cone shapes. Cave is modelled using cube, opening its front face and flipping normals to be able to see inside of cube. The gate way is modelled using 3D cylinders and sky is placed as a plane in the end of the scene. The glowing orbs are coded as spheres in respective co-ordinates.

Features

• Materials
  1. Mirror : Dielectric Material was used to achieve the mirror effect which can be seen inside the back of the cave where the tree is mirrored.
  2. Metallic : Phong Material is used to get the metallic effect which we can see on the tree trunk and branches.
  3. Diffuse: Lambertian Material is used for other models like sand dunes, sand, cave gateway and sky which diffuse the light.
  4. Combination: A combination of materials is used in objects like tree(Phong, Lambertian) to get better effects and desired colour shade.
• Lighting
  1. Point Light: To get the glowing effect on the orbs on the tree, Point light is used in front of each sphere.
  2. Directional Light: To get desired dusk effect, 2 directional lights are used at low intensity. One from camera towards scene and the other from top right of camera to the scene.
• Texture
  1. Image Texture: Freely available texture images are used for sand, dunes, cave floor(grass texture) and gateway.
  2. Flat Texture: A constant colour is used as Flat Texture for the sky.
• Runtime Acceleration
  1. Camera & System Specs: A Depth of field camera is used to render the scene with aperture radius of 0.045m and focal length of 70m. The image was rendered in 39mins on a system with 16GB RAM and Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-6100U CPU @2.30GHz 2.30GHz
  2. BVH: BVH with 3 leaf nodes was used to speed up the run time.

References

1. 3dtextures.me: All image textures files are taken from this site which are freely available.
2. turbosquid.com: Tree model was taken from this site which is also available for free.