Instancing Render

Lots of airplanes, rendered in Photorealizer. Click to view big (originally rendered at 1920x1080, but Blogger has scaled it down to 1600x900).

I rendered the image above using my instancing and transformations system. There are multiple copies of the same airplane model. I arranged the planes procedurally, giving them translations and rotations and ensuring that they don't overlap.

There are 1272 planes in the scene. Without triangulation, that would have been a total of 100 million polygons. But I had Photorealizer triangulate the model which resulted in a total of 194 million triangles. With or without triangulation, the total number of vertices was 121 million—polygons in a mesh share vertices in Photorealizer.

The scene has a BVH that contains the planes, and the plane has it's own BVH that contains its geometry.

This is one of the first images that I've rendered using my improved transfer curve.

The image is a revised version of an image that I rendered in 2011, which you can see below. I probably prefer the lighting of the old version, the way it's lit by the sun, but I lit the new version differently so I wouldn't have to deal with caustics.

Old version.

Gold Bunny Lit by Sun and Sky

Close-up of photon contribution. Click to view large. (I originally rendered this image at 1618x1000, although Blogger has scaled it down to 1600x989, so there might have been a slight loss of quality.)

I rendered an image of a gold bunny lit by a sun and sky (the render from this post) that I rendered in my sky renderer. This was possible through the use of an HDR environment map, HDR environment map importance sampling, and HDR environment map photon emission. The top image below is the complete image—it contains all of the paths that light can take from the light source to the camera. The next image contains only direct illumination, as well as specular reflection of camera rays. The image after that shows only the photon contribution. Finally, the image above is a bigger, brighter, higher quality view of the photon contribution; a total of over one billion photons were stored in the photon map (not all at once) when creating that image.

All possible types of light paths.

Direct illumination, as well as specular reflection of camera rays.

Photon contribution.