I’ve been using Blender since January and this is my first foray into cycles. The Bitcoins are my model, all features besides the plain silver and gold are geometry. The screen (without the screenshot), keyboard, and mouse came from Blendswap, I could have modeled them myself, but since they are only backdrop it saved quite some time. Due to my very limited experience with material nodes I also got the gold material from blendswap.
Problems I encountered along the way were fireflies, don’t know how to deal with them yet. Getting the binary text along the coin ridge to follow a circle while rotated and insetting them into the coin. I traced the Bitcoin logo and then connected it to the circle for the inset, but I used huge ngons which needed a lot of triangulation before I was able to apply a nice subsurf, need to learn how to do this better. Also I tried using the rigid-body simulation to drop the coins in a nice pile, but they hovered above the surface and intersected each other many times. Don’t know where I went wrong, but I’ll try experimenting with a clean scene next time.
I tried mesh and cylinder, and most of the others too, but it didn’t seem to matter much. I think I’ll just set up a basic simulation and move up from there. I could have used a displacement map, but I wanted to try full geometry. Might render out an even closer shot.
Took me a full 5 minutes to notice the intersection, and I was looking for it. My eyes were just so distracted by how pretty the coins were and how perfect the modeling was. Really excellent job, especially for a first cycles render!
If you told me those were real coins in that final shot, I’d believe you. Really good job on that. Something about the lighting’s a bit off in the first two images, however. I think you’ll notice it if you look especially at the topmost coin on the pile that’s at a 90 degree angle to the PC screen. It should be getting more light, as should the other coins facing away from the screen. Maybe play around with the Ambient Occlusion a bit, or put in place a really faint Sun lamp to represent the extra glow of the PC screen.
For the rigid body simulation: which kind of collision mesh did you use?
