2025’s Christmas-themed render makes use of LuxRender’s Hybrid Bidirectional Rendering to accelerate this high polygon scene.
Dissimilar to every other GPU accelerated engine available today — path tracers which only trace rays from the camera — LuxRender’s hybrid engine uses both CPU and GPU hardware to enable true Bidirectional Rendering. That is to say, the system traces rays from both the camera and from light sources.
To simulate the appearance of glitter on the surface of the ornaments, several particle systems generate over half a million individual glitter objects. The random orientation of these tiny cubes allows them to catch and reflect light, mimicking the grainy and disorderly appearance of glitter.
