Laura Lediaev wins the Utah Rendering Competition for the 3rd straight year
Congratulations to Laura Lediaev, who won the Utah Rendering Competition for the third year in a row. Laura's entry, titled Christmas Teapots, was the overall winner and receiver of the audience choice award. The rendering is based on creating time-varying composites of light layers in order to simulate the effect of twinkling Christmas lights and flickering candles. The scene has 30 lights, one inside each teapot. Light layers are created during rendering by saving the contribution of each light into its own image. This produced 30 images/layers. Each light produced 4,000 samples per pixel. That adds up to 120,000 samples per pixel after compositing. Laura allowed up to 10 diffuse light bounces and 200 specular bounces.