this was a little fun project, mainly to get into Blender (usually using Cinema4D). Still a lot to learn, as some stuff simply works different. But in general I am sure, that I will use Blender more often now!
Nice job, and welcome to blender 
The top image looks great, aside from some small jpeg artifacts (PNG ftw!), but I thought that I would perhaps point you to a nice video by Bartek Skorupa on cleaning up noise on renders to maybe help with the bottom image a bit without having to spend hours rendering.
thanks for the link! Actually it looked pretty okay, but I had to up the exposure afterwards and this made the noise very noticable. I will take a look at the video.
Good job !!
both renders look great.
Hello! Great work! What would you say the biggest difference between Blender and Cinema 4D are for you?
good question. Not sure if it is fair to compare an application, that you are using for many years to something fresh.
I would say, the learning curve in Cinema is probably not that steep. The UI is very polished and as beginner you can easily make use of icons, buttons and menu. Later on start to use more and more shortcuts.
And it is superstable with just a few bugs. Blender also works pretty good, but sometimes its hard for me to decide if I am doing something wrong, or if something simply does not work (yet).
But overall I must say I like the Blender UI too, I like how fast you can customize and i really can´t understand, why many people still bash Blender for it´s UI.
I like modeling in Blender, what I miss at this stage (I guess I didn´t find so far):
- fill selection
- extrude; in CInema I can select a loop around a cylinder and then do an extrusion, faces keep connection. When I try to do the same in Blender, it start to use some sort of median normal of all selected faces, which is not what I want. It only works when I use the extrude individual, but then the faces of course loose their connection.
-precision, when in edit mode, you can select some faces and can take a look at the Transform Median - but only for the position. Would be nice to have that for scale too. On the other hand the option to display Angle and Edge length is nice
-I really like the node based material system and the compositor
-I like how you easily can combine Cycles with Blender renderer via compositor
As soon as I have some time I will do my next Blender project, as I really want to dive a lot deeper, as Blender has some stuff build in, which you only can get for extra cash in Cinema, like fluid/smoke sim and stuff the like.
@walli fill selection? what’s that?
extrude, it’s easy, just switch select type (vertex/edge/face select) to your desire by pressing ctrl+tab, than press e to extrude. to select edge loop, alt+right click.
presicion moving you mean? while moving, press ctrl to precise with bigger integral, press shift to precise with smallder integral. or press n to show up properties panel and you can change the global or local xyz value. g to grab, s to scale, r to rotate.
download this shortcut guide by andrew price here: http://blenderguru.com and find with the keyword “cheatsheet”. blender 2.5 and 2.6 have the same shortcut and ui.
thanks, this all works fine with extrusion and precision. What I miss is that I select a bunch of faces for example and then have a numeric imput field for the scale, just like the Median Transform. There I could read the overall scale in my prefered unit and then I can enter a new absolut value if needed.
I really like the way how Blender works there, select faces, scale, limit axis, enter a numeric value and hit enter. Thats really very well done and this is something I miss in Cinema. But in Blender I don´t have feedback about the absolut scale.
And about extrusion, yes, I can do a edge loop and I can hit e - but then the faces don´t move along their normals, they move along some sort of median normal. It works just fine with Extrude Individual, but it behaves strange when choosing Extrude Region.
Thanks for the Cheatsheet link, thats really handy!
…but then the faces don´t move along their normals…
select the faces hit “i”(inset face) enter numbers in tool. or oldway - hit “e” ,“enter”,then alt+s.why not post your doubts in support section of this forum.
great, good hint! I for sure would have posted this question, as soon as I start my next project. Just need some time and then have to decide for a topic. I guess I will try an outdoor scene. Thanks again!
Nice work Walli.
Still a bit grainy…
I remember a “Walli” from the german c4d forum… is it you ?
Kind regards
Alain
Very nice work. I’m impressed.
You can speed up cycles renderer a lot. I mean 1/10 for the time you spent there. The worst is the denoise techniques.
Just don’t let cycles to calculate all these reflected rays from glossy surfaces. You don’t really need them. Not always. Reflections won’t be lost.
The inset tool. This what you’re asking for. [I]
If you edit its parameters it remembers them for the next [I].
The inset tool is the only multi extrude tool we have in blender.
yes, it´s me 
I guess learning the finetuning of a renderer is always the aspect which takes the most time. And as I really like what I have seen from Blender so far, I for sure will spend some time on getting hold of those details.