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My final project for CS 175 (computer graphics) was a raytracer. My partner and I came up with this surrealistic art gallery scene as our final image.
The Pac-man-like creatures are the visitors to this strange aquatic museum, and the images hanging on the walls (sans one, which should be obvious) are actually the hall-of-fame images from the past three or four years of CS 175. The centerpiece is an orrery of semi-transparent Platonic solids orbiting around a yellow sun, all floating above a marble column.
The original image was rendered at 1024x768. However, to improve the layout of this page, I reduced the image to 640x480, so the image you see here isn't quite as impressive as the original.
For those who are familiar with raytracers, notice the use of texture mapping, spherical textures, both noise and wave bump mapping, clipping, and spotlights. The self-referential image was created by re-generating the image several times, each time at a higher resolution.The light sources include a point-light source behind the eye (giving rise to the specular highlights on the spotlights), four spotlights, and a point-light source inside the sun, which causes shadows of the Platonic solids to be cast onto the walls. The raytracer implements hierarchical bounding volumes to speed up rendering by at least an order of magnitude. With anti-aliasing (on-the-fly 16x supersampling) the image took 14 hrs to render at 1024x768 on an HP graphics workstation (circa 1995).
I am proud to say that this image has been selected to enter the CS 175 hall-of-fame.