Egg
10th September 2006

This rather abstract image is meant to represent an egg, broken open with smoke billowing out. The effect doesn't really work very well because the smoke was so hard to control. I guess I need vortex particles or better seeding parameters to get the right look.
Original resolution: 800 x 673. Polygons: ~25,000. Render time: ~1h

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Volume Caustic
12th August 2006

A volume caustic is the 3D analogue of the classic 2D caustic. Photons are passed through the refractive lens which focuses and tints them. They are then traced through a homogeneous participating medium and are probabilistically absorbed depending on the specified density. I used a standard atomic decay formula to determine the probability of each photon being scattered. Ray marching is also used to calculate single scattered radiance along the primary ray. 1,000,000 were used to make up the volume photon map.
Original resolution: 1280 x 1024. Polygons: ~5,000. Render time: ~10m

Blender Monkey
25th July 2006

A test of the new Physical Sky feature. The lighting in this scene was set up simply by specifying the date and geographical location and the turbidity of the atmosphere. The interesting geometry was generated using Greeble, a free plugin used for designed for modelling "cities and Death Stars". I borrowed the scene setup from Richard Rosenman and his amazing gallery of Greeble scenes. Although this image features the Blender monkey, the scene was in fact modelled in MAX.
Original resolution: 1280 x 1024. Polygons: ~40,000. Render time: 2h 8m

Bunnies
6th July 2006

This render of two metalic bunnies is designed to show off the physically accurate camera model. All attributes of a real camera are simulated, in this case a 50mm lens at f/1.5 focussed at various depths.
Original resolution: 640 x 480. Polygons: ~138,000. Render time: Not recorded

Buddha
10th April 2006

The latest free offering from our good friends at Jotero. I set the material properties to those of wax and lit the scene with a key area light with a dim skylight for filler. The scene took forever to set up because of the finicky translucency parameters. It took a lot of tweaking and re-rendering before I was satisfied enough to put it through a production-quality render. I ramped up the number of samples per pixel insanely high to get rid of the noise (over a billion rays cast!), but the extra time really paid off.
Original resolution: 480 x 640. Polygons: ~378,000. Render time: 5h 42m 25s

High Genus Knot
9th April 2006

This beautiful shape was created by Topmod, a manifold mesh modeling program designed by Ergun Akleman. Starting with simple primitives (a cube in this case), Topmod provides a toolset of complex remeshing operations and shape interpolation that allows the intuitive creation of highly intricate models. The inspiration for this scene came from a photograph of a stereolithograph taken from Akleman's paper.
The material has the scattering and absorption properties of human skin (found in Jensen's BSSRDF paper). A large, dim area light provides the soft shadows. The SSS pass still suffers from some annoying low-frequency noise, although it's not really noticeable in this image (UPDATE: Fixed!). More renders to come...
Original resolution: 640 x 480. Polygons: ~30,000. Render time: ~1 hour

Bronze Figure
8th March 2006

Another high quality Jotero model, this time rendered with a glossy Phong shader. You can download this model, along with many others, from www.jotero.com.
Original resolution: 480 x 640. Polygons: ~500,000. Render time: ~50 minutes.

Ajax Bust
7th March 2006

Thanks to the enormous generosity of 3D scanning company Jotero, this fantastic free model has been circulating around the internet and is rapidly becoming as popular as other famous models such as the Sponza Atrium. I lit the scene based on the setup chosen by Jotero in their demonstration render. The image is rendered using stratified Monte Carlo sampling at between 100 and 1000 samples per pixel.
Original resolution: 480 x 640. Polygons: ~540,000. Render time: ~1h 20m.

Translucent Teapot
7th April 2006

First test of the rapid hirarchical BSSRDF shader inspired from Jensen's original paper.
Original resolution: 800 x 600. Polygons: ~4,000. Render time: ~15 minutes

Ice
27th February 2006

A quick test of the newly implemented bump mapper which also turned out to be an ideal candidate for the shiny new dispersion shader! A tutorial for the construction of this scene, complete with textures and maps, can by found at shader-speed3d.
Original resolution: 1280 x 1024. Polygons: ~400. Render time: not recorded

Diamonds
26th February 2006

Original resolution: 1280 x 1024. Polygons: ~400. Render time: not recorded