The primary motivation for this image was to switch from our bright and sunny scanline image to a darker, night-based scene. We wanted to encapsulate both an indoor and an outdoor feel, which motivated us to design a terrace restaurant scene. We also wanted to take advantage of the capabilities of our ray tracer, namely a scene with diverse lighting, shadows, reflections, and transparencies. We experimented with several background skylines to achieve the outdoor part of the scene, and selected the current one as it gave the best urban feel we wanted to achieve with our depth of field implementation.

All of the building structures (walls, roof, awning, floor, fence) were hand-made by us in Blender. Furniture such as the tables, chairs, cutlery, and lamps were downloaded from online. We manually textured all models by hand to give a consistent feel to the scene. The windows on the back wall add a transparency layer to the scene, with the kitchen blurred out behind the glass. We experimented with several light positions to both make the scene look good and also match the lamp models placed in our scene. We have tungsten lights in the dining part of the scene, and fluorescent lights in our kitchen.

With regards to technical contributions, we implemented depth of field with 1,000 samples per pixel. We selected 1,000 samples because the difference between 100-200 samples and 1,000 is fairly noticeable. We also implemented photon mapping and have multiple lights to generate soft shadows. We used 1 million photons. As recommended by the TAs after our demo, we reduced the aperture to make the foreground of the scene clearer. We also tried several camera angles and focal lengths to get the optimal effect while still showing all the parts of the scene that we wanted to. We also disabled the shadows on the background plane in our code to make the scene more natural. Finally, we implemented a multi-machine, multi-threaded version of the ray tracer to allow us to pursue higher quality renders. Our final image is 1920x1080.