Please remember to state if your entry is pure, open or non-competing.
“There are two main goals for these contests: Fun and Glory.
Fun: You get only 4 days to create a cool image, based on the theme for the week.
Glory: After 2 days of voting, a winner is declared. The winner picks the theme for next week.”
Pure entry, Cycles render, 32 samples & compositor denoising in 2.90.0 beta. Central composition, 1x1 aspect ratio. Things I did for this that I’ve never done in Blender before: modeled contact lenses for Suzanne to get smoother eyeshines, and used the compositor’s Alpha Over node to attempt a match of the intended destination’s background color (earlier render had a transparent background, which doesn’t work on this forum ).
Thanks again to @Xeofrios and @Millani for the compositor suggestions that improved the procedural starfield!
Looks good @KickAir_8P. The eyes came out nice, the reflection of the light came through nice on them. How did you get the stars to “shine” (marked in red) and also get the light red tint (marked in blue) ?
Those nifty shine-lines on some of the stars are from the Blender Compositor’s Glare Node, recommended in last week’s thread by Xeofrios! I uploaded the .blend file at the bottom of my entry post, take a look.
As for the reddish shade on those stars, it’s not supposed to be there and I have no idea how it got there. The two compositor effects on that backdrop are that glare node and a little bit of blur from a blur node – the backdrop itself is an emission node fed by a noise node controlling black-to-white color ramp, and it’s on a different view layer from Suzanne so it couldn’t’ve picked up any reflected orange. I’ve no clue, sorry.
All materials are procedural.
Render in Cycles at 4K resolution with 48 samples for main scene, 1024 samples for the Suzanne star cluster and Horoscope paper.
Have an issue with layers here, any help would be great. Scene has 4 layers: the main layer, a layer with the Suzanne star cluster, a layer with the horoscope paper and a layer with the star field. The layer with the star field is a plane which sits behind all other meshes (and looks correct in viewport) but when its rendered, it sits on top of objects loosing its depth (as seen with the telescope). What am i doing wrong ? Blender File
Thanks @KickAir_8P for the tip about the twinkly stars.
Always looking for a different way to do things, any feed back is welcome.
I was playing around with the Glare node Streaks type trying to figure it out when I realized that in my entry render I’d left the Color Modulation field on the default of 0.25 – dropping that to zero reduced the red but didn’t get rid of it entirely, so I still can’t tell you what caused it. (But upping the Color Modulation field to 1 yielded an interesting rainbow effect – combined with upping the Fade field to 1 looked kinda techie.)
But it also got me wondering: what if I wanted multi-colored stars? After all, visible stars come in different colors. Came up with this:
You can use a Blackbody node instead of the color ramp for the colors. They look pretty unrealistic right now. Of course you will have to pass the noise texture output through a map range before connecting it to the blackbody.
Yeah, went with bright colors for the demo, I was planning on dropping the saturation before I used it in anything else. The Blackbody node hadn’t occurred to me, I’ve never tried it before.
Rendered in Cycles @ 1024 samples, Blender 2.90.0 Beta. I usually do animation and so use EEVEE since I have no patience, so I thought this might be a good opportunity to learn a bit more about Cycles. Used 2.90.0 mainly cause I wanted to play around with the new Multires modifier.
The one thing I borrowed for this was a normal map from Joao Paulo’s “Dragon Scales” texture.
Anyone else having issues with the site at the moment? It is running rather slow and images posted are not showing up for me? I have already dumped my cache files and tried edge, explorer, and chrome and all the same result.
Ok yeah the last 3 posts that contain images including my post above all show broken image links. So looks like it is just on my end then or an issue as you stated. Thanks.
).
The two compositor effects on that backdrop are that glare node and a little bit of blur from 
good luck.
