In the Elevator

DS4P -> Reality/LuxRender to 7500S/p

The elevator in my building has mirrors on three sides, as well as the ceiling (which also has cut-outs for the recessed lighting in the elevator). The remaining side with the door and control panel is metal. Standing in it, I got to wondering how well LuxRender would reproduce the "infinite reflections" optical effect. As I don't know any of the 3D modelling tools, I built the elevator in DAZ Studio using plane and cube primitives, along with a hefty dose of using the polygon group editor to separate out some of the surfaces. Hence why there are no beveled edges and the control panel is so crappy looking. But the dimensions match the real-world elevator. The rest of the elevator is pretty simplistic in design, so the primitives did a reasonable job of reproducing it. In the real elevator, the paneling below the trim holding the mirrors is a ceramic tile that I didn't have an appropriate texture to mimic with. So I ended up using the herringbone procedural texture from the LuxRender Materials Database, as it gave a nice look.

To get the repeating mirror reflections, I had to crank up the eyedepth and lightdepth. Even at the max of 64 that Reality's UI allows, you can clearly see when the depth limit is reached, as the reflections stop and the rest of the mirrors became completely black. I ended up with using a depth of 128 and even at that level, there was still a small section in the mirrors that was still a black void. So I moved the girl in the pink dress around a little to hide that black convergence point in the opposite mirror. (There were always two girls, as I wanted the image to appear as if it was from the point of view of one figure looking at the other. To this extent, the camera is actually parented to the head of the girl in the pink dress, and was adjusted via the head/neck pose controls, rather than directly moving the camera itself.)

There is still a LOT of noise in the mirrors; the non-mirror surfaces cleared up pretty well by my usual benchmark of about 2000S/p. Judging by the shrinkage of the PNG's file size each hour (as noise goes away, PNG files compress better and thus get smaller), it would probably have required 10x as many samples before the noise in the mirrors became acceptable. And with my crappy elevator control panel holding the image back already, I don't think it's worth rendering for three weeks straight.

Both figures are Genesis. The girl in yellow is using Thorne and Sarsa's Princess morph and skin. The girl in pink is using ARTCollaborations' Alisha morph and skin.