Seeing what Cycles can do, what I have rendered out so far.

Ace_Dragon · April 23, 2018, 5:12am

The Geometric Spheroid Room

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The Pathways

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Another way out

In all three images I’ve done some meticulous retouching to remove noise in various locations after applying a light use of a denoise filter to remove fireflies without losing detail, I would’ve preferred to have no noise at all right out of the render window, but even if I had a CUDA build my GPU is a few generations old and would likely take nearly a day at least to fully clear.

But I’m happy with just what I can get out of Cycles at this point, internal rendering in Blender has never looked so good and so far looks to become my render engine of choice. (high quality GI with the bonus of using nodes to control how the light renders, which is most obvious in the third image, something I really like compared to Luxrender when I tried using that engine). The usual aliasing that occurs around lights in the Cycles engine also gets significantly reduced with the node group I use for lights.

The materials make heavy use of my custom group nodes, rendered out anywhere from around 18 to 22 hours each (purposely set the passes value to 20000 so it only ends when I see a decent point to stop). Minor tweaking to brightness and contrast done in the Blender compositor. Smoke effect in the third image done using a curved stack of planes (which looks like Cycles can render out in a better way then the old BI renderer.

Enjoy:cool:

Ace_Dragon · April 25, 2018, 1:11am

More renders done with Cycles, simpler, but very nice to see them fairly converged with few to no fireflies after more than a dozen hours of rendering even with the use of my group nodes to accurately simulate materials from matte to glossy (you can’t really say that so much in a number of cases using Luxrender, I just love Cycles).

A Walk of Style

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Running to the Edge

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chip4brains · April 25, 2018, 1:11am

I like 'em, very strong geometric appeal here. You know how to handle color well.

Atom · April 25, 2018, 1:11am

I really like the tunnel with the lights and the road leading to the arrow.

Ace_Dragon · April 25, 2018, 1:18am

Another render done with Cycles, less focus on geometry this time.

A whole lot of red tape.

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It was a little tricky to get the tape material looking good enough for me though, I wanted something somewhat translucent, but also glossy, but not translucent as in seeing through the material, which took quite a few test renders to get right. This is also the first image of mine that makes use of my distance blend group node to fade the temple hallway to black (otherwise I would’ve had to model an unrealistically long hallway that may disappear from view before it was complete black).

Much of the more complex detailing was easily done thanks to the excellent inset extrude addon, looptools was also a help in making a small well for each collumn tightly around the base, Jambay’s collumn generator was also useful in creating a base pillar shape to work off of.

I also would note that the original render had a number of black and white dots in the pixels covered by the tape that were easily removed with post-pro (a filter specializing in removing specks), though ideally there should be fixes in the Cycles shading code that would prevent them.