I ran across this beautiful laser-cut light box design a while ago, maybe from Colossal? These first two images are not mine, they come from this cool Light Box on Amazon

(Not an affiliate link, I just think it is cool).

Anyway, I found it really inspirational, and since I have a fast path-tracer to play with, I decided to try to make a digital one of these as a sketch.

I expected that this would be a relatively quick one, and I was totally wrong! This took most of the day, and was really challenging. This is a very complex rendering problem and the OmniVerse renderer needed a lot of hand-holding.

It was difficult to get the front layers bright without the back layers getting way too bright.

There’s a bit of fractional opacity here, which in a path tracer acts as a stochastic probability that a photon will ignore an object intersection. I absolutely love the diffuse-lit versions of these as well.

These diffuse versions aren’t even path-traced! They’re just the output of the real-time renderer (a separate renderer) in OmniVerse.

If I were going to take this beyond just a sketch, I’d spend a lot more time on the cutouts for each individual layer, instead of just cheating them from a depth map, as I did here.

• omniverse
• blender