TITLE: Sunny Morning
NAME: Richard Sutherland
COUNTRY: United States
EMAIL: rich@brickbots.com
WEBPAGE: http://SuperMegaMulti.com
TOPIC: Light and Fog
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: rrs_laf.jpg
RENDERER USED: 
    Mental Ray

TOOLS USED: 
    Maya, Mental Ray

RENDER TIME: 
    39 hours 24 minutes

HARDWARE USED: 
    Apple Powermac Dual-G5 2.7ghz, 3.5gb ram

IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 

I imagined this scene as a quiet Sunday morning, shortly after a nice cup of
coffee in front of a sunny window.  I love the way a bright shaft of light can
fill a room with gentle illumination.  Add in a bit of dust and I think it
makes a very nice scene.

DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 

In a nutshell...Lots and Lots of Rendering. 

The modeling was not difficult, but it had to be sufficiently realistic to
present the look I wanted.  This mainly involved beveling edges, and carefully
randomizing some bits such that there were revealing shadow lines and a bit
more 'used' look.  The details were key, like the trim and floorboards.

The wood textures are probably a bit more complex than need be.  I used a
layered shader in Maya to build up the wood look.  Starting with a grain
pattern, then a layer of stain, then a glossy layer.  I generated several
copies of the shader network to orient the grain the proper direction and scale
for each piece of 'wood' that made up the tables and chairs.  I used a similar
network for the floorboard, again with several copies so that each board had a
slight variation in grain and color.

The rendering was done with a physical light and volumetric fog combined with
final gather (I can provide all the boring settings or a file if someone is
interested in the particulars of Mental Ray).  This is a lethal combination
rendering wise.  The volumetric fog renders fairly quickly on its own, as does
the final gather, but combining them leads to a huge increase in the number of
rays as the final gather rays traverse the volumetric fog and spawn more rays 
along the way.  

To try and work around this, I rarely rendered both effects at one, tuning one
and then the other in turn and doing very small combined renders when necessary
to balance the contribution of each.

Composition was a key aspect of this piece, and I started with very simple
shapes and tried a variety of angles to get the diagnal of the shaft of light,
the pattern of light and dark and avoiding any wierd tangencies.  

If anyone has any specific questions about modeling, texturing or other bits,
email me and I am happy to share.