Technical Details:

It was my first experience with 3D modeling tools and I did a lot of modeling ... All the models are made by myself from the scratch in Maya ... Now I feel I just can model anything!!

 

For my scene having Depth of Field was essential ... at the end I used 1024 samples/pixel because of leaves near the camera!

 

I implemented Snell/Fresnel Reflections/Refractions model to capture the behavior of the light and water accurately.

  

 

I also implemented the Beer Lambert Law for water absorption. Without this effect the image does not look right even if you don't know what is the actual problem!

 

I have Area Lights and Soft Shadows but you have to try to find the shadows!

 

Having Environment Map added a lot to my final image. Check it without the environment map

 

 

I did a lot of Texture Mapping and a nice Bump Mapping in this scene ... there were no place to put my Procedural Textures! Theses textures greatly impacted my rendering.

 

 

I implemented Photon Mapping for having high resolution Caustics. I store 60,000,000 caustic photons in most of the scenes.

 

 

     

 

You definitely don't want to see my scene without Anti Aliasing and Supper Sampling!

During the course we implemented fast Axis Aliened Bounding Boxes (AABB) Hierarchies for fast intersection detections.  hierarchies. For triangle intersections I use Plucker Coordinates which is way faster than Barycenteric intersection. Because you can pre-calculate huge amount of calculations.

 

 

I did not use my Montecarlo Pah Tracing because my scene really did not need it and since my scene had a lot of reflections and refractions it was adding a lot of noise to the image.

 

Now if you like you can check more images.