I actually preferred the rippled glass over the standard glass. Gave the image a bit more depth I think.
Some more interaction between the straw and the water, near the bend, would look better. As I said in the WIP thread, there should be a bit of capillary action going on there. Would make it look a ittle more realistic.
The straw still doesn’t look plastic enough for me either. It does look better than the WIP image, but still not quite there.
However, those are nit picky things in the grand scope of the image. Great work.
I did take your suggestion about the water/straw, I’m just afraid it was too subtle. Take a look at the underside of the accordion portion of the straw… there is a bead of water built up in the grooves… Really, there is. Take a look at it again, please, and tell me what you think of what is there.
I’ve redone the floor, upped the spec on the straw, and added some blur (rendering now). I’ll put a bit more water on the straw tonight and re-render.
Sure I’m serious! You think I’d JOKE about Blender?
Well, yafray anyway. I don’t joke about yafray either.
If you’re doing a yafray render, you can go to the camera properties in Blender, choose DOF distance, aperture, sampling… and bokeh type. Ring, hex, pent, square, triangle, disk1, disk2 are your choices. Keep in mind that I am making an assumption - that the bokeh type is referring to the aperture, not the effect. I could have that all wrong. I know, I know… shocking but not out of the realm of possibility. I was wrong once before.
As the link I posted hints at, triangular apertures are kind of like putting socks on a chicken, and some of the others will give you neat effects, but as a personal choice I’m not playing with it right now. Disc1 and disc2 are some sort of special cases, but I read it a while back and cannot recall what differentiates them from the garden-variety bokeh aperture.
Why? Are you truly interested in using this phenomenon? We should take this to the Blender General forum - be an interesting thread for quite a few folks, I’m sure. Perhaps there is someone who is an expert on it (and Blender/Yafray) and we can both learn something.
Well, I would be interested in it if my modelling skills were not still extremely limited. I think the best-looking thing I’ve modelled so far is the guitar from the Blengine “Lighting Technique” tutorial. And I was only able to do that because the tutorial was so well written. (What’s odd is that it was a lighting tutorial and the lighting part of it was written quite skimpily.)
But, yeah, if I had a nice macro scene to render, I’d be delighted to know that you can even choose details such as how the background-blur looks.
I’m constantly amazed by what Blender achieves in a small, free package. I know someone trying to get work in animation, and his fellow graduates all agree that you’ll never get work with Blender skills. I just don’t get it. Are Maya / 3DS / XSI really so much better? At those prices, I’m certain I’ll never find out for myself.
Really, there is. Take a look at it again, please, and tell me what you think of what is there.