In our rendition of Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night, we drew heavily from the pixels of the actual painting. The backdrop of the rendering uses a version of van Gogh's sky which we generated by removing all foreground images from the paint in Adobe Photoshop. Thus, the cypress tree, houses and church, and hills of the foreground are all rendered in three dimensions. We achieved the visual effect which emulates the painting by using a number of tricks of perspective--rotating the "floating disk" of the foreground reveals that the tree is in fact much larger than the church in our rendering--and by creating all of our textures from the painting itself. The cypress is a composition of many cone geometries overlain on which we superimposed the repeating pixels of the cypress in the painting. The houses are repetitions of many simple geometries. The hills and bushes are modeled as an image of van Gogh's hill and bushes on a flat sheet; in addition to this texture, we've added a heavy level of displacement using a hand-drawn map to achieve the desired topography. To bring in all together and give it a "night" look, we placed the light source right above the "low star" behind the cypress, added ample ambient lighting, and made our objects tend to reflect blues diffusely and yellows specularly.
Created by Dustin Janatpour and Kyle Archie