Blendoodle 76 (Cycles, Geometry Nodes)
I’ve gotten big … and blocky … and a bit displaced. 
Blendoodle 77 (Cycles, Geometry Nodes, GeoScatter)
Played a little bit with the GeoScatter ( Geo-Scatter - 5.4 Update: Time for Scatter Groups! - #3565 by BD3D ) addon today… in manual mode, but I can see that there’s a lot to learn with this addon. 
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Blendoodle 78 (Cycles, Geometry Nodes)
Back to glass, with coloured balls within.
and some alt vp renders
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Blendoodle 81 (Cycles, Geometry Nodes)
not particularly happy with the caustics turnout, but alas, is well past time for me to sleep so will have to do until i retackle it.
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So I had been doing some Blendoodles before joining here, and this post is to show one of those, where my avatar is from. This is a recreation of a piece titled “The Scream” I did in Bryce3d (version 3) back in July of 1998. Here’s the original render:
The original shape was created with a heightmap that was mirrored, and in Bryce, the moon in the sky was part of the software, with a texture/photo of the moon I added to it. Since this was part of Bryce, that allowed for the nice halo affect as well. The skies in Bryce, even back then, were surprisingly powerful while remaining creative.
So, I decided for Blendoodle #31 to recreate the scene as best I could in Blender.
For the remake, I used curves to layout the basic shape and worked from there. The moon took a bit more work… the moon itself is just an image plane, but to get the glow (since it’s not a real light) and halo I had to resort to some texture tomfoolery …
the glow:
and the halo:
The sky lighting itself was from the addon PSA ( https://blendermarket.com/products/physical-starlight-and-atmosphere ) with some heavily tweaked settings.
A cropped version of this image has been used as my avatar ever since avatars became a ‘thing’ on the innertubes.
For giggles and snorts, I’m also attaching the other Bryce images during that “minimalist” era (using heightmaps for the subject)… I’ve not decided if I will redo either of these in Blender:
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Thanks for such detailed explanation, Kelly!
So you mean that that first picture is taken from 1998, is that right? If so, wow, it reminds me of the earliest 00s when TES 3: Morrowind was just released. A lotta things changed since then, unfrotunately.
I have to admit that your avatar is now more than 20+ years of living 
Second jubilee I guess?
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yep, 25 years ago now. the .br3 file is dated 5/12/1998 (fortunately all the datestamps on the files have been kept over probably dozens of media over the years … lol). i did not keep all the files from back then, but the earliest one i still have was 4/27/1998… from the looks of it, that’s about when i picked up Bryce:
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Looks very beautiful!
Sadly I didn’t save anything from my childhood days, just a whole lot of nothing…
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sadly, those were not childhood days. well, i’d consider myself a child then, but legally was definitely an adult. lol. yeah, nothing left from childling years proper… and i had a huge footlocker of Legos. probably could buy a second home for what that would be worth now. rofl.
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Ahah, it should be called “Memories’ home”!
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amen to that. rofl! yeah, just did the math, was in my early 30s then. computers before then were for coding and the such, and games (ahh, good ol’ moonbase )
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My first one had the horizontal case with a CRT monitor on it, those were days. Windows 98/ME/2000, Heroes of Might and Magic III and the summer outside the window with kids’ yelling “hey, turn off your PC and let’s hang out in the street!”
lol, yep. the first “PC” i had access too was a Compaq “portable” my mother brought home (she worked on mainframes) to learn Lotus123 on. overnight I had hacked it and put in messages throughout the tutorial personalizing it for her (she could run circles around mainframes, but pc’s threw her for a loop). shortly after that, she got me my first computer, a zx81, which i still have buried in a drawer somewhere.
(mind you, i had already had some limited experience on mainframes. my first ‘videogame’ was Adventure (later redone as Zork) over teletype. )
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Oh, so you a hacker, huh?
I don’t quietly remember where mine came from. Probably it was an old one from the Soviet Union. There was Windows 95 installed on it, and frankly, I didn’t have much to do on it (as far as I remember), but only some pretty simple games like first chapters of Tomb Raider and games off of Sega Emulator. But at least it gave me the conception of what the PC actually is. Oh yeah, how can I forgot, and an old 3 mouse button with wheel. I guess I’m from the medieval era, do not blame me for that! 
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at least you had a mouse with buttons. in my day, we had to hunt down mice, and train them to do stuff for us when we pet them
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Aahah, double entendre
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