Do you see the 7 in the reflections?

This is a newer version of an old render of mine which you can see HERE. A lot of people seemed to like it, including GIZMODO.COM, and Microsoft themselves.... so here's a new one!

After seeing the wallpapers that come with Windows 7, I decided they are only slightly less disappointing than usual, and I made my own. I wish Microsoft would venture out and put some real good quality art in their OS. Many people never change their wallpaper, screensavers, etc, and having something completely badass as the default would help make the OS look better overall. I do understand that it needs to appeal to a general audience, but commmmeee oooon.

MICROSOFT, IF YOU ARE LISTENING, I WILL MAKE YOU ONE OF THESE FOR FREE.



Technical Details

Made in Maya 2010, rendered with mental ray. Modeled with simple Maya deformers on cubes. Lit with one enormous disc area light, a white environment casting final gathering, and an enormously wierd shaped 7 like thing to reflect. Used mia_material for the glass, and just a DGS for the ground. Area light was emitting 10,000,000 photons, final gathering was only at 3000 accuracy. Rendertime was about 30 hours, but thats because I refused to use the mia_materials reflection/refraction cutoff threshold. I wanted every single reflection and refraction, hence the retarded amount of detail in the edges of the windows. It almost looks like it shouldn't be there.

You have absolutely no idea how hard it was to get the reflection to look right. I went through probably 200 test renders plus many hours in IPR before deciding this one was just good enough. Look at the screenshots below to see how weird looking the actual 7 object is when not seen in reflections.



Here's a few viewport shots: Photon Map, Final Gather Map, Wireframe, Silly Seven

Here's some test renders: Invisible!, Early Test, Getting Closer...