Final Render

The complexity of Escher’s displayed gravity-defying structure certainly only unfolds the more you look… Another twist we added is that there is a slight «Inception» going on, namely the Escher diorama stands on a wooden table, which itself is part of the scene and holds another, smaller diorama. For the Escher diorama, we utilized an untextured 3D model found online and manually increased its level of detail by texturizing it, beveling edges and various other tweaks. The table and chair contained in the scene are self-modeled through Blender.

Utilized resources:

• Escher Diorama
• Environment Map
• Textures (Marble, Wood)

In terms of utilized rendering features, all persons consist of a homogeneous medium, which should give them a more mysterious look. The nebula on the floor uses a procedurally generated heterogeneous media (with a Henyey-Greenstein phase function) based on fractional Brownian motion. An environment emitter surrounds the scene, which uses a texture we found online that we additionally color-graded with darktable. Materials use either a diffuse or a microfacet BSDF supplied with image textures. The image is captured using a realistic camera model with a D-GAUSS F/2 22deg HFOV lens system, which introduces some complex optical effects (kept very low for artistic reasons) such as vignetting, distortion and depth of field. We rendered our image on the Euler cluster and finally denoised with Intel’s Open Image Denoiser.

Scene composition was done in Blender and exported to Nori using the BlenderNoriPlugin. We also exported the camera position with Blender, though some tweaking was necessary as we used the realistic camera model. In the following you can see a screenshot of the scene in Blender. Note that as the volumes were modelled procedurally, the Blender scene only contains the bounding boxes that were used.