by nuclear & dstar
The image depicts a bar in Night City called 'the neon bulkhead', home to low-life thugs and washed out console cowboys looking for some action.
The renderer is a path tracer called 'erebus' and it was mostly written from scratch within the past couple of months for the competition. Erebus is free software under the GNU GPLv3 or later, and can be found on github: https://github.com/jtsiomb/erebus
The renderer itself is a highly portable command-line program, but it can also operate as the back-end of an interactive rendering GUI. A simple OpenGL GUI is currently implemented.
The only 3rd party library used, is the intel open image denoiser, and it is optional. If enabled, it has to be compiled separately and dropped into the erebus source tree, to be statically linked with the renderer.
To render the image, run: ./erebus -s 1920x1080 -r 250 scene/bar.erebus. It
takes about 10 minutes on a Ryzen 9 9950X, and writes output.png with the
result.
Alternatively run the interactive ./erebus-gui -r 250 scene/bar.erebus, but it
may not produce identical results without tweaking exposure, gamma, and tone
mapping at the end. Press tilde (~) to bring up the post-processing controls.
nuclear_dstar-night_city_bar.tar.gz (17.2 mb)
ORRC backend is free software, AGPLv3 or later. - source code - github project