This was my recent project. I made it in Cycles and rendered it with 1200 samples. Making it took me about 8 hours. I wanted to try out atmospheric lighting as well as modeling a grand piano. I got inspired to make this image by playing the piano 
I would love to hear your thoughts.
(I’m new to BlenderArtists and this is my second post so I’m sorry if I did something wrong)
This is really very nice and nice to see some real volumetrics working well, non-faked - so good job!
Maybe the piano could be/have a bit more sharper reflectivity/glossiness. I feel like its more towards a matt varnish than the ultra, high-gloss imho? But there’s no rule saying it can’t be tha way!
Maybe it’s because theres not too much in the surrounding space to reflect… you haven’t used an hdri?
But overall, very nice image and solid composition - actually, is/was the composition on fire??
Can we have the render times/specs/sampling (out of interest for the volumetrics:) Thanks!
It took five hours to render on CPU with 1200 samples. But I only have a laptop to render on, which is always pretty slow. Also thank you for your kind feedback I did not want to make the piano so glossy because it was supposed to look old. The scene is only lit by a spot lamp that shines through the window, not by a hdri, I think the volumetrics are not affected by the environment anyway. It only seemed to work for me with the spot lamp. I also didn’t render with any volume samples, mostly because of render times and because the image looked to foggy.
(uh, doh! I should have read the title!) Didn’t realise that was dust when viewing on my tablet, but can see it now. Very good, and i think I was wrong about the manuscript too, it’s not on fire is it, just really old,crumpled…oops
Thanks for confirming the render details too:) i think it was the uniformity of the dust which made me make that hasty perception regarding the gloss.
Yes, the paper was supposed to look old. The dust really does look uniform, maybe I should have used a texture to make it less uniform.
