How has Cycles changed your creative thinking and artistic approach?

A little more than a year and a half ago, we heard an earthshaking announcement that would forever change the world of Blender, that announcement was a modern render engine named Cycles. The engine was complete with a modern, high-quality GI-based system that users have been clamoring to see in the old Internal engine for many years only to see it on the horizon at times, but never come, but now that Cycles being in Blender brings an out-of-the-box solution, many things have changed.

Among the things that have changed may be how you approach 3D art and your creative thinking, now with GI at your disposal, what exactly has changed to accommodate this new feature?

I can tell you in my case, now that I’ve gotten a good collection of general-use shaders for high quality materials, I am working in Blender, working to create a new image, and when completing parts of the scene I end up with a tempting decision to forgo textures completely.

Now why would I bypass the use of textures, because I get the impression that with the materials I have, I just want to see the beauty of the light bouncing around and interacting with the materials, something I at times end up seeing as an art in itself, sure it’s not like that in every case and in most cases there actually are at least a few textured surfaces. What I am seeing is the work not being defined by textured surfaces, but the light bouncing around in a pure environment. This is in part due to all of the subtleties of indirect illumination as well as caustics (when enough samples get done), and as a result is something I think can only be truly enjoyed in a GI engine like Cycles and not BI, the fact of Cycles being an RGB renderer instead of a spectral one, which one not might expect so much, also helps because it tends to make it easier to get vibrant coloring which can bring out those subtleties.

So in turn, how has Cycles affected your creative thinking, your creative vision, and your artistic approach?