"Crystal Chess"

This project was inspired by an image I once saw at the Lightflow Tech website. The internal relections and refraction within the chess pieces seemed so much more realistic than I had ever managed to create myself. I liked the image so much, that I decided to take it upon myself to re-create it from scratch using Imagine.

[Original: http://www.lightflowtech.com/innovation.html]

<-- This is the original image that I used as a reference during my re-creation. It's resolution is limited, and the JPEG compression artifacts ruin much of the detail, but it was enough to give my imagination something to work with.

Here is a set of trial images used during the design process:

In the 1st image, I started the basic scene layout and began developing the "material" used for the chess pieces. In the 2nd image, we have the basic chess pieces, but the lighing is all wrong. In the 3rd image, we significantly improve the lighting model, and tweak the materials some more. In the 4th, 5th, and 6th images, we play with Depth-Of-Field (focal point), experiment with textures for the checkerboard ground, and tweak the models a bit more. Finally, in the 7th and (so far) final image, the models are finalized (examination of the internal relections in the original image revealed more details of the model's internal structure), the lighting model brought very close to the original image, and most importantly, the alignment and framing of the camera adjusted to produce a view nearly identical to the original.

All of these images (except the original) were rendered using Imagine 2.1x. It took several hours (I don't remember exactly) to render the 1280x1024 final image on an old K6-200 with 64MB or RAM.