VU Rendering - Hall of Fame 2026

The Chokepoint

A scene covered by a thin, homogeneous fog on the left side, featuring emitters, a couple of glass cubes and a mirror. Bar for the Stanford Bunny everything was hand modeled. Rendered with a MIS path tracer with support for dielectrics and mirrors. As a final step AgX tone-mapping is applied to give the scene a nice look, especially the emitters.

Pantheon

Anisotropic homogeneous media with single scattering and emission. Unfortunately does not handle medium-medium or medium-surface intersections well, so I had to construct the scene in a way where the clouds do not intersect each other or any surfaces, but still look (mostly) continuous from the camera's POV. One parallelogram emitter in each structure, as well as a sky light above the scene. 

Morning

A scene of the table in an old apartment. Wavelength-dependent dielectric IORs demonstrate a simple spectral rendering system. Caustics are inverse path traced to decrease noise. All geometry was hand-made (or simulated).

Unusually clean Workstation

It shows a small EE Workstation and has some 3D Printed Objects with Participating media and a HDPI screen showing a diffraction grating effect. It was achieved by adding a spectral pathtracer to nori.

Portals

This scene is made for demonstrating the portals on the right and left. Middling one is a mirror.
At the first glance, the portals look like mirrors, but if you look carefully, you see those are not mirrors.
The portals show the views of each other, the camera ray is teleported and flipped from one portal's frame to other portal's frame.
There are glass/mirror objects, and a broken piece of glass on the floor, a little flower and a intertwined knot object.
Only the sofa model is derived from sketchfab, ajax model is from course, the others were created in Blender.

"Sofa_Single" (https://skfb.ly/6Vwut) by tjddn1985 is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
 

Football in the attic

The scene showcases a football which was shot through a window. The window shattered into pieces, flying through the room, allowing sunlight to enter. There are curtains that are affected by both the shot and wind, using cloth simulation to make it look pretty. 2 Mirrors were added to scene as well as a glass cabinet, which use the dielectric and mirror BRDFs. Most of the models are self made, with the exception of the monkey, ajax, alien plant and cat.

The plant emits a blue light while there is a small area light shining pink inside an open parcel. The ajax is made out of glass and the monkey itself is also an emitter, albeit a weak one. I implemented UV mapping so I can include textures. The models for the plant and cat were taken from sketchfab, while the textures were taken form polyheaven. All of them are available for free.

I used a gaussian blur as well as 1024 samples and MIS to render the scene. 

Pastel Reflections 

A pastel scene demonstrating physically based rendering with a diffuse landscape, lots of shiny reflective mirrors, some delicate glass and a textured doughnut showcasing UV mapping.
The whole scene is illuminated by multiple area lights distributed across the sky and a glowing mystery potion.
Most elements were modeled by me in Blender except the teapot and Luma.

Source for models:
Teapot: https://github.com/jaz303/utah-teapot/blob/master/teapot.obj
Luma: https://makerworld.com/de/models/2618151-luma-super-mario?from=search#p…

Glasstable

All objects in the scene were created by me. The image on the wall was drawn by my girlfriend.

The most interesting object in the scene is the glass on the table, it is very intricately modeled with slanted rills on the bottom. These can be seen in the caustics.

The light comes from a large surface outside of a small window to try to look like natural sunlight.

Levitating

This abstract scene features a floating rock formation above water, illuminated from below by a torus-shaped emitter.
The rock is covered with moss, crystals and hand-sculpted flowers. Metallic ropes float around the rock, creating a mix of organic and artificial shapes.
All objects in the scene were made in Blender: stylized rock, moss, crystals, hand-sculpted flowers, metallic ropes and water.
The scene uses diffuse, mirror, and dielectric materials and was rendered with next event estimation and multiple importance sampling.

Surrealism

Scene of a surreal museum. Uses a HDR environment map for lighting and microfacet BSDFs for some objects. Depth of field is also used. The arm is a scanned 3D mesh and was rigged manually in Autodesk Maya and the eye is made from scratch and has a dielectric lens mesh.

Refreshing Drinks at Poolside 

A summer poolside scene showcasing dielectrics (pool water, drinking glasses with straw bending), microfacet materials (straws, inflatable ring, lounge chairs), and depth of field focused on the table.
The assets were taken from fab and assembled in blender.
 

Pythagoras: A self reflection

The scene features a basic room with two busts of Pythagoras, a temple-like object and a curved mirror.
The bust of Pythagoras was created using photogrammetry, by taking many pictures, creating the model in Meshroom and cleaning it up in Blender.
All other models as well as the scene were created in Blender.
 

Very shiny e30.

The scene features the classic BMW e30, using microfacet BSDFs for the most of the car model components. Rendered using 8k samples.

Meridian Trench

I decided to recreate the famous Star Wars meridian trench scene. All three ship models are from sketchfab and imported and exported through via blender. Especially the x-wing was tricky, as it consists of 20 individual parts that had to be exported separately.

The trench was made by myself by extruding an initial plane mesh and subdividing it twice, then applying a geometry node with a random offset to create the surface. I additionally implemented environment map sampling for the sake of this scene. The glass cockpit of the x-wing was sliced into its own mesh to demonstrate mirror materials.

The scene was rendered with 8192 SPP, which took approximately 3.8h to complete. I used regular path tracing with NEE and MIS enabled. For the depth of field, an f-stop of f/8 with a focal distance of 40 was used to focus on the x-wing in front of the camera. No wookies were harmed in the creation of this scene.

Lab Experiments 

I wanted to experiment around with modifying the path of the light rays in the scene. One of the effects is a black hole approximation (left), the other is a portal (right). Additionally, the scene is rendered using a fisheye lens-based camera model.

Cozy Fireplace

A cozy fireplace scene fully modelled in Blender. This scene is lit by a layered low-poly fire with graduated emission from dark orange embers to bright yellow flame tips, and three candles placed on top of the fireplace, creating a warm atmospheric glow.
Diffuse materials were used for the fireplace structure, candles, logs and room surfaces.
Dielectric materials were used for the crystal clusters in front of the fireplace and the crystal ball on the base, refracting the warm firelight.
Mirror materials were used for the fireplace railings for kind of a metallic reflective effect. Rendered using NEE and a sample count of 4096.

Late Night Visit 

A cozy evening is interrupted by an unexpected guest looking for prey.

The scene features diffuse, mirror, and dielectric materials in a room that is lit by light from an adjacent room, the moon shining through the window, and candles placed on the furniture, showcasing different global illumination sensations.

It was rendered using path tracing with RR path termination, Next Event Estimation (however, only using the 1/0 strategy), cosine-weighted importance sampling for diffuse materials, and a sample count of 10000 samples per pixel.

The scene was composed using Blender and consists of mostly royalty-free models from PolyHaven, Sketchfab, and cgtrader, as well as a few simple custom modelled objects (candles, room, and text).

A plant, a lamp and a unicorn

A plant, a lamp and a unicorn: casting their reflections on a window glass.
Tree branch (by Angelina), pilea plant (by AllQuad), Origami Unicorn (by Glowbox 3d), table (by yryabchenko), chair (by BATRIC_18) dish (by National Heritage Administration) and window (by jaggu) from sketchfab.com, all CC-BY-4.0.
 

Ancient Bunny Party

The scene consists of a bunch of bunnies and ajax statues being illuminated by multiple light sources from different directions. In the center there is also a bunny with an emitting material. One of the bunnies also is made of a dielectric material, reflecting the cube light sources.

Caustics

A simplistic scene, highlighting the caustic and light gathering from the reflective face sculpture.