A little while ago we had a SOW-oriented topic going on where a few people made some SOW's.
I made one also, but with a little twist, and i got a little crazy with various premium effects and such... result was this thingy which took around about  a month's worth of rendering on a dual dualcore opteron system! Though most of the time it ran on 3 cores, and a few days it has actually not been rendering at all. So total render time might as well be roughly 3 weeks.. Either way, its about the craziest bit of premium render rendertimes i've seen!

It's got TA, which does actually make a significant visual difference in this scene. It's also got blurry reflections of various degrees, simulated subsurface scattering, and ofcourse soft shadows. And all that mixed through each other with metaballs mixing their different textures wherever they overlap.. I gues thats why it took so long! That and the 256rpp...

The render as you see it here has had some subtle photoshop tweaking done:

• levels (slightly darker shadows)
• color balance (subtly warmer midtones and highlights closer to the camera)
• gradient mapping (subtly more yellow in bright area's subtly bluer in shadowed area's)
• chromatic abberation
• DOF (generated with the help of a brycean depth render)
• Slight noise added (bryce's noise is too monochromatic)
• My name in the bottom right corner

Hope its worth the render time for an SOW :-P haha

nice one yea it was worth it :O)

The render is fantastic, and a very puzzling and intriguing subject matter.

What's the mat you used on the red blobbies?

It certainly qualifies as a SOW with a difference.

Fascinating!

Thanks, it's a sort of 'thirsty' colour.  I must do some more experiments with textures, build up my two libraries a bit more, this has reminded me.

The texture on the pink blobbies is a sort of fleshy tone - is that one of the standard presets?

B6 seems to have a few more of those than 5 did...

All of the textures are my own :-) Though the water was based on a preset.
The pink one is fleshy, but it was designed that way by me from scratch. It's also got Simulated SSS, and some subtle heavily blurred reflection to more closely resemble flesh. It's not a perfect flesh shader yet thou... not by a long shot. Those are hard to create :-/

Turned out great. Yeah love that fleshy tone mat.

What does SOW stand for?

Sphere over water

Quote - Sphere over water

Ahhh... should have figured that out on my own.  :)

So now the image makes sense and that is quite the SOW!! :)

I'm more of  a Sphere Over Checker board kind of guy :)... goes back to the Amiga days.

Well i did throw in the checkered floor... ;-) either you make a tribute, or you dont ;-)

Quote - Well i did throw in the checkered floor... ;-) either you make a tribute, or you dont ;-)

I really love the image..  now before doing the full render did you know it was going to turn out this way in the lo-res previews? Or was it a leap of faith... on bumping up on the render settings and letting it go?

I did some 4-36rpp test rendering, mostly rendering little parts to check the overal looks of the shaders. Renders without premium effects to test general lighting conditions, models, camera angle and composition also saved time.
By the time i hit the render button for the final render I had a pretty decent idea what it was going to look like.

Nice one RR - looks to me like a surrealistic pie ;-)

Quote - Nice one RR - looks to me like a surrealistic pie ;-)

Make that, a surrealistic fountain...  That what it looks like to me...

:b_tonguewink:

rayraz,

Is the water made from metaballs as well as the blobbies?

I ask because I wondered how you got the water on the blobbies that are dipping into it, to look so like a miniscus.

The water is a large flat metaball :-) It allows the blobs to blend in and also allows the flesh shader to blend in so the waters transparency acts as an added control to make the flesh more translucent as it comes closer to the water level :-)

It works very well.  (socking this little piece of lore away for later)