Adrift, Best Render of the Advanced Rendering course at the Master’s Degree in Computer Graphics, Games and Virtual Reality.
Data of interest:
• The judges were Marcos Fajardo (Solid Angle / Autodesk), Matt Chiang (WDAS) and Jorge Jiménez (Activision Blizzard).
• There were 10 submissions and 1 winner and an honorable mention.
You can check the certificate here!
Technical details
• Used the educational Nori ray tracer.
• Programmed in C++.
Features programmed in Nori
Two kind of materials (reflective functions) have been used:
• Diffuse: a matte material that represents rock, wood and cloth in our scene.
• Dielectric: a glossy, specular and transparent material that takes the form of the
calm sea and the bottle’s glass.
The rendering technique used to profit from these materials has been Path Tracing with Multiple Importance Sampling, combining BRDF sampling with Direct illumination. Furthermore, for this assignment, three features have been developed, which are:
• Albedo textures: for the diffuse material, albedo textures have been
implemented that give high-frequency information about the reflected color of
an incident ray.
• Depth of field: a physical-camera effect that simulates aperture and a focal point
for the lens, blurring elements furthest from it.
• Ambient lighting: profiting from the implementation of textures, ambience
lighting has been included, completing its own set of challenges, as Importance
Sampling for noise reduction.
Visual Semiotics
In the closest plane we observe a close-up of a ship inside a glass bottle as it floats on the sea, allowing the viewer to appreciate better the details of the sailing boat. In the distance, the same ship travels to an island while a storm is subsiding, illuminated by the dusk sun. Both of this luminous attention points contrast with the darkness of the clouds and the island, harbouring a dry tree that evocates the lack of life of the location.
At a first glance, a visual path can be traced from the bottle to the ship through the vanishing point, then to the bright open sky and finishing in the island in a spiral-like pattern.
This scene has been designed in Blender, with models of the island, ship and bottle, and sea by their own authors.
The following images show the process that has been followed by including features until reaching the final render.
