The above image was created as my final project for CS148, under the auspices of renown bodybuilder and occasional professor Ron Fedkiw. Everything in the scene was made from scratch in Blender, while the final image was rendered with the Cycles engine. All my work in the class was done in collaboration with my good friend Naama.
The scene was inspired by the movie Inside Out, in particular when the character Joy ventures into the annals of her host’s memory. We appropriated the concept of a colorful shelf of memory orbs, and then brought another charismatic Pixar character into the scene, Baymax. We would like to think that he’s having a happy moment perusing good times past.
The stars of the show when it comes to this 3D model are the memory orbs. Most impressively, there’s actually only one canonical orb in the scene! The rest are procedurally generated duplicates (same with the shelves). There is some simple math to figure out how to place them, and then a color is randomly selected from a weighted list of options:
The most notable benefit we get from ray tracing in our scene is once again in the memory orbs lining the shelves. These orbs glow many different colors: yellow, red, green, blue, and purple. However, the light source for each orb is actually the same—a bright white light in the center of the ball. The light source is surrounded by the material of the orbs, which is transparent but tinted, and thus changes the color of the light ray after emission and before it hits the camera. Other benefits include the slight light penetration through Baymax’s inflatable body as well as area and sky lighting.
On a more personal tack: making this scene vindicated a lot of the philosophies that I’ve picked up in Stanford’s Design program. During my first forays into Blender, I was paralyzed to the point of inaction by the fear that any step I took—extruding a face, tweaking a texture—would mess up what I’d built so far or would build going forward. I was limited to following tutorials, which restored some of the structure I was familiar with from programming to the complex world of modeling things that looked good (technical term). But the d.school has changed my perspective. The will force you to spend hours and hours sitting in the in-between phases, acting first and iterating, abandoning ideal perfections to make something real. With practice, you get comfortable in this space. That willingness to screw up and CMD-Z was crucial on this project.