My image draws inspiration from the totem theme of the film Inception. The scene depicts a bar counter on which someone has spun the totem, which hangs between staying upright and falling. Are we dreaming? In the back right, the glassware of the bar sits arrayed and upside down, catching light from a window with blinds off-screen to the left. On the back left, a tumbler sits upright, though the depth of field obscures its precise shape. The bottles on the shelves of the bar contribute vibrant colors to the far back.

The scene is shot though a 286mm zoom, with the focus on the totem. I implemented depth of field to highlight the zoom effect. In addition, because the image was difficult to render, I added command-line options for rendering a portion of the image. To get the final render, I split the image across 13 corn servers. The connection to the servers proved unreliable, and AFS would sometimes inexplicably lose permissions tokens, which would prevent the final output from saving to disk. I kept the image on each server small so that the "checkpoints" would happen often, and failures would be less of a setback. I also implemented and experimented with photon gathering, but I did not enable it for this scene because it adds significantly to the rendering time.

The totem and glassware are from Turbosquid. I made and textured the counter. The colored bottles in the background are an image on a plane behind the counter. The image took 78.4 hours to render.