Computer Science 3710 - Ray Tracing Project

Reflection of a montain on a lake in Banff, Alberta.

I choose this scene because if from an area that I enjoy visiting it seemed like it would a challenge to reproduce.

I made the image using Blender 2.42 in Linux. I spent a lot of time doing tutorials before I was able to produce anything. Once I got the hang of blender, I started by creating the mountain by manipulating a mesh plane. I then created the sky, water, shore, and the trees. The most difficult part was the water, it took quite a while to get the reflection and the ripple to look the way I wanted it. I started with a plane, then made it reflective, and then added a ripple modifier. For the trees a used a tree generator for Blender called Gen3. I only added 2 trees because it slowed down the Blender and the rendering process too much. I had had trees all along the base of the mountain but my computer would always crash during rendering.