Whew
This was a long-ish project for me. Usually I cook up the pieces I post here in a day or so (unless it's a tool development piece, in which case that's often quite a bit longer)
Anyways, this one took the better part of a week to complete, and I'm glad I've gotten it to a state where I'm happy with it
This project was heavily inspired by this amazing photo from Renan Ozturk:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mountaineering/comments/1hryf2d/the_descent_down_everest_always_provides_a/#lightbox
I decided to flip the render horizontally, as I thought that fit the composition of my render better
Parhelion simulation I made in Houdini for this project. This has a fisheye projection. The simulation was done by casting tons of light rays through hexagonal prisms and plotting the diffraction onto a texture. This is sort of like 'reverse' ray tracing