Our final image is inspired by the classic film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We designed and
created our composition around some of Indy’s most iconic possessions and the main artifact of the film.
The backdrop is an antique map of Turkey (where the grail is found) from the time period, and the other
items in the scene were chosen for their relevance to Indy lore.
We used Blender to model, set-up, and preview our scene, and generate rapid iterations of our design and
composition. We wrote Python/bash scripts that cleaned up the generated .mtl file so that the CS148
renderer could immediately read it, and a Blender addon that exported the positions and rotations of our
lights to C++ code.

We created the models for the holy grail artifact, whip, desk, drawer, nameplate, glass jars, and glasses
lenses from scratch. The globe, books, lantern, glasses frames, and pen were collected from various
sources online. The hat was downloaded and heavily modified to resemble Indy’s famous hat. We made
the holy grail by tracing its silhouette from a freeze frame in the original movie and spinning it around its
axis, before manually adding imperfections; we created the whip by extruding a circle along a Bezier
curve, combined with a tapering curve; and we carved out the glasses lenses using the proportional edit
tool in order to refract light more realistically. The original wood, hat, grail, and wall materials, along
with the map’s normals texture, were obtained from Poliigon, with other textures (whip, map, etc.)
obtained elsewhere. We refined the diffuse textures to remove artifacts, improve color, and add other
details. AwesomeBump was used to generate initial approximate normal maps, which we subsequently
refined manually in Photoshop.

We positioned several area lights around our scene to provide illumination and soft shadows. The lantern
contains a modified multi-directional area light, which in tandem with our implementation of shadow rays
and a custom attenuation function produces a glowing effect that sets the mood of the overall scene. Our
shadow ray attenuation is also responsible for the nice effect of differentiating between the corks’
shadows and the glass jars’ shadows on the wall. Enabling reflectance mapping allowed us to model a
complex metallic/diffuse pattern on the grail, creating a compelling focal point of the scene. We
implemented parallelization, which provided a 4x improvement in rendering time that proved crucial to
rapid prototyping. We also implemented global illumination with photon mapping, and while the effects
were nice (particularly near the lantern), we were unable to secure sufficient computing resources
(memory and time) to render a sufficiently high resolution image with this enabled -- future work includes
investigating alternative versions of photon mapping, such as stochastic/progressive photon mapping,
which would be more conducive to our more modest resources.

Both artistic and coding work were done collaboratively. Shyamal focused more on texture refinement
(Photoshop), parallelization, global illumination, and other technical/code aspects, while Wilbur worked
more on model development (Blender), transmissive shadows rays, and normal/reflectance mapping.
Composition, scene design, and iterative refinement were done together.

[ PS: rumor has it that the big man Harrison Ford himself makes a cameo somewhere in the scene... ]