For my final course project I did a ray tracing scene shown as below. The theme is a checkmate scenario in one of the chessboard corners. It's apparent from the scene that the brown colored king is surrounded by the white queen and bishop.

The scene is modeled with three lights, which brought out the reflection effect of the chessboard, the mirroring effect in the background, and the shadow effect of the chess pieces. The distributed ray tracing techniques used in the scene were anti-aliasing and soft shadows. The anti-aliasing is noticeable from the edges of the chessboard and also how the overall scene is more or less blurred out or lost in details, which I am not quite sure after seeing others' anti-aliasing effect in project three. As for soft shadow effect, you can see it from the pawn in front of the king, the shadow the brown pawn casted onto the white queen, and a bit of bishop's shadow. Sorry if you can't really see them. I would have rendered a bigger size scene if faster computers were available. To enhance the overall scene, two mirrors are placed along the chessboard. If you can't really see the reflections, increase the monitor's brightness scale.