My head a splode...

Well, I haven't messed with the noodles enough to get to that anyway.  I've played with bump, and displacements (Damn, every material that looks good has values in the <.2 range...  Shouldn't they recalibrate those?) environments and ambient...  Pretty much mastered those, and moving to math functions and procedurals next.  It wouldn't cause me too much trouble to put fresnel (how's that pronounced anyway?) on the lights, though I'd never have thought of that by my lonesome.  Things is, originally I had some crazy fantasy of foregoing rendering altogether and just running some filters over the preview output. Now I'm wondering if the enhanced hardware preview will render the corrected lights properly? (I've temporarily  given up on that partly because I like bumps and displacements, but mainly everything looks too floaty w/out shadows.  I'm seriously hoping for GLSL bump and parallax displacements with shadow mapping in P8's preview)  

While I'm on that topic allow me to post my first ever image to the forum: