Teapot Rendering Competition

In the past month I was asked by Kushal Ponnam if I wanted to participate in a rendering competition for his class of Ray Tracing for Graphics on his masters at University of Utah. The project consisted in making a scene where it had to have at least one Utah teapot, and the scene had to be rendered using the ray tracer build over the semester from the ground up by the students, in our case by Kushal. I immediately accepted the challenge and we had 2 days for making the scene, including concepting, modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering and post-production.

After some discussions of ideas for the scene we ended up with the idea of using the teapot as a fish aquarium, and the idea developed throw the modeling phase to the final scene submitted, it ended up being three teapot's in total, one was dropping water to the main teapot where two fishes and another small teapot were located. We found that this concept was interesting and we choose to stay with it.

Aquarium Teapot Clay Render - 01

The stand for the objects came as an idea when after having the main scene modeled the teapots were floating in mid air, we wanted for the image to look quite clean and simple like it belonged to a museum. With this in mind I created some kind of stand for the objects, very geometric and museum like.

Aquarium Teapot Clay Render - 02

The next phase was lighting, as I was building the scene I rendered it using V-Ray just to have an idea on how the scene could look. We wanted the same position for the lights and camera as the ones I was using in 3Ds Max, so we transferred and positioned that information to the ray tracer software so it looked the most identical possible.

Aquarium Teapot Light Positions

The rendering phase took some trials and errors and the time was limited. The resolution was one thing that we had to take into account to keep the render time resealable, being the final output 692*800, but we manage to get a resealable image from the ray tracer, with global illumination and caustics.

With the image submitted to the competition we managed to won two Awards, Best in Class Award and Student Choice Award.

                            Image Submitted for the Teapot Rendering Competition

After the competition I decided to render that same scene in V-Ray, the result is as seen bellow.

Aquarium Teapod V-Ray Render

Thanks for watching, feel free to give feedback in the comment section below.