Congratulations to Laura Lediaev on winning the 2015 Teapot Rendering Competition. Her stunning image titled Pile of Teapots, was the winner and audience choice award.

This image is not strictly photorealistic. Laura rendered out the image into two main layers, one for specular highlights and caustics, and one for diffuse lighting. She also has a mask for just the teapots, and one for the ground. Laura was able to split up the image and adjust the brightness of each part independently. Here she decided to include some diffuse reflection/refraction for the teapots, but mostly removed the diffuse lighting from the ground. This gave an extra glow to the teapots and also emphasized the caustics. 100,000 samples per pixel.