Our image is a sunflower field reflected in a water droplet hanging from a blade of grass. The grass also has a ladybug and several other water droplets on it. 

Our image was modeled and textured in Blender. The sunflowers and ladybug models were found online, and we created the blade of grass and cube for the skybox (the sky/grass background). We used subdivision to smooth out the geometries of flower and ladybug.

We varied the ambient color, transmittance, reflectivity, and attenuation in order to create different textures for the objects. For example, the water droplet had high transmittance, reflectivity, and index of refraction to make it transparent and reflective. We also created the texture for the grass in GIMP. The ladybug had no attenuation and high reflectivity to make it shiny. In addition, we implemented the skybox for the ray tracer by adding an IsAffectedByLight property to the Material class. When this property is false, the ray tracer ignores all light and only returns the diffuse color for the object.

For lighting, we have area lights and a backlight. The area lights helped to create soft shadows of the ladybug on the grass and the sunflower petals. 

We implemented depth of field to put the blade of grass, ladybug, and water droplet in focus and the sunflower field out of focus. We purposefully made the aperture large in order to create a visually stunning, almost surreal effect. We wanted the water droplet to be the window to the sunflower field. Finally, we implemented multi-threading to optimize the image generation. This allowed us to render our final image in 7 hours. 

Lucy implemented the skybox, the ladybug, and reflectivity. Arit implemented the geometry, depth of field, and multi-threading.