This was one of my first images I posted to DeviantArt. It should capture the moment when you have a crush on somebody and realize that you have to end it. While you have a connection to the other person, the person does not share the warm feelings and over time the coldness will stab you and your warm feelings will come to an end. You then can move on and find someone else that actually shares the same feeling with you.
Technical Aspects
It was an experimentation with glass materials as well as HDR lighting. The first time I rendered the image with Mental Ray (and a 500Mhz Computer) the render time was around 15min. Over the years I used this image as benchmark to see how much render time improvements the new Version of Mental Ray / new CPU etc. Now in 2018, the image is rendered with Arnold and the render time is about 30s (with a 4Ghz CPU)
The HDR Image was one of the first widely available HDR Images of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence (.hdr) by Paul Debevec
About Neal Burger
Neal Burger is a successful entrepreuner. He is the founder of Acme Inc, a bootstrapped business that builds affordable SaaS tools for local news, indie publishers, and other small businesses.