An old scene I made for the release of P9/Pro2012, to demonstrate the possibility of lightcasting (meshlights) in Firefly IDL.  After a few material updates, this is a P12 Superfly render at 4K resolution.

sailing through Lothlorien

The Grey Havens from Lord of the Rings

Grey Havens

An elvish grey ship underway at night

Grey Ship

Splendid!

La Femme as the holographic AI Cortana

Cortana and Master Chief in the A.R.C.

La Femme as the holographic AI Cortana

Cortana and Master Chief in the A.R.C.

Thank you, @Miss B !  :D

Material update -and a few new meshes, such as the apsynthe "I dream of Jeanie" bottle- of a scene set up to test and experiment with BB's material ideas for metals, glass, volumetric liquids, and light-scattering candle wax.  Rendered at 4K in P12 Superfly.  At 4K, you can read the embroidered mithril script on the hems of her shawl and skirt!  :D

Have a seat, have a sip

As often: an exercise that ended up in a beautiful picture ❤

No lighting involved, and I had to reduce slightly the "power" of the HDRi.

The candles are from 3dcheaoskate and adapted for superfly. The flames and 5 point lights set at 0.2% light the scene

The candles are from 3dcheaoskate and adapted for superfly. The flames and 5 point lights set at 0.2% light the scene

Very well done! I love the atmosphere

That is lovely... so soft and intimate. Great render.

Thank you both so much

Oooh, nice lighting effect, @RedPhantom !

In the liquor cabinet of Cafe' L'Homme:

In the liquor cabinet of Cafe' L'Homme:

Seeing how creative some users are rendering their candle scenes, I decided to put something together for Superfly.  I grouped 3-types of candles together, a tealight, a votive, and a pillar, on a desktop.  I fashioned an aluminum cup out of an open-end pipe primitive and inserted the tealight candle into it.  Then all the original shaders were converted to Cycles PBR.  This included the self-illuminating flames.  To help with the candlelight, I added the accompanying point lights, changed them for Blackbody emission, and scaled each to their corresponding flame.  An additional low-intensity mesh area light was placed above the scene as a fill light.  The Faerie is Miki 4.

Seeing how creative some users are rendering their candle scenes, I decided to put something together for Superfly.  I grouped 3-types of candles together, a tealight, a votive, and a pillar, on a desktop.  I fashioned an aluminum cup out of an open-end pipe primitive and inserted the tealight candle into it.  Then all the original shaders were converted to Cycles PBR.  This included the self-illuminating flames.  To help with the candlelight, I added the accompanying point lights, changed them for Blackbody emission, and scaled each to their corresponding flame.  An additional low-intensity mesh area light was placed above the scene as a fill light.  The Faerie is Miki 4.

The flames are really impressive, especially with the dark area in their base center, and the overall is splendid.

A scene made for @bagginsbill's tutorial thread on underwater godrays:

Halo-pixie explores undersea ruins

I've just discovered the wonders of taking the HDR .exr raw render from the RenderCache folder and color-correcting it in photoshop. Super simple way to make up for our lack of filmic colorspace.

Tutorial for it is pending approval and should be up soon :)

Great! Wow

Well done!!

Looking forward to seeing it!

Playing around with Lafemme and the morph brush

Playing around with Lafemme and the morph brush

The result is... wow ❤

Playing around with Lafemme and the morph brush

Here is my latest render, as usual based on an older scene that I tweaked the heck out of, because apparently that's how I roll and/or learn. The version in my gallery is topless, but I thought for the forums she might as well dress up a little. :-)

Two things of note here: first and foremost, for the longest time I've been struggling with pure Cycles eye shading. In principle it should be easy, just use a Glass BSDF with default IOR for the cornea to get a plausible lens refraction and reflection. But my irises always ended up way too dark, pretty much black. So last night I decided to finally debug the problem properly. It was actually a whole mess of things I got wrong:

- Refractive caustics need to be turned on in the render settings. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I forget.

- The default color for the Glass BSDF node is a very light gray. It needs to be set to a perfect white for a fully transparent lens.

- I had a bump map on the iris that was way too strong. Antonia's eyes are not ready for a closeup, anyway, so no point in using the bump map, at all.

- With all these things fixed, there is still some loss of brightness due to surface reflections, so the iris texture needs to be quite a bit brighter than one wants it to appear in the render. I found that an HSV node with the value set to 2 does a good job, but YMMV.

Number two is the displacement map on the beanie. I'm using a weave texture here that at first I simply plugged into the normal, but that didn't look that great, especially in closeup. So then I plugged it into the displacement, but of course I had to crank the subdivision all the way up to get a decent effect. Totally worth it, though, I think.

Here's the cornea:

And here's the beanie:

I routinely use multiply only on the displacement math node and use lower values unless you really need to exaggerate the displacement.  I've only had to go with 1 subdivision on V4 for skin textures.  I have started experimenting with the glass node on the cornea, and that IOR value will need to be changed to 1.33 to be close to accurate.

This is what I'm currently using for the cornea.  

hborre posted at 11:01 PM Sun, 12 June 2022 - #4439914

I have started experimenting with the glass node on the cornea, and that IOR value will need to be changed to 1.33 to be close to accurate.

And yes, I should probably just switch to a PrincipledBSDF for the cornea.

Refraction in the eye is very negligible because of the membrane thickness.  It can be ignored for the time being.

Hmm, your PrincipledBSDF settings simply make the cornea invisible for me. Could be a bug, though, I'm not on the latest version. Anyway, GlassBSDF seems simpler to use for this.

Use this arrangement for the Cornea and Eye Surface if you have one:

It will allow full transmission of light rays without quenching the iris texture brightness.  You won't have to drive HSV values higher than needed.

Cool, I'll give that a try.

Yeah, I think that works quite nicely. I'll need to get Antonia some better eye geometries soon, though.

Bonus Voronoi lace:

Nice material.  Check the Subsurface color, there is no Subsurface value to activate it meaning that there Is no blue effect on the material.  Otherwise, I like it.

Oops, the blue was just a leftover. I didn't mean to put a subsurface effect on the material. Although now that you mention it... :-)

Very nice material @odf. 

Thanks! I think it's nice for when one can't be bothered to make an actual lace texture.

I decided to try a "physically correct" simulation of a mirror in Cycles nodes: two parallel planes, the back one with a fully reflective shader like this

and the front one with a glass shader that has a very faint green tint, almost white. I think the result looks quite nice:

One could also use a very shallow glass box with a separate reflective material on the back. I think this method could also be useful for simulating various forms of blemishes and damage that happens in real mirrors, but haven't tried much in that direction yet. I think it's important not to have a perfect reflection, or the mirror will end up looking like a portal into a parallel dimension.

Just poked my nose in here. Love the lace and eye surface textures! Thanks.

She is quite lovely, @Afrodite-Ohki, thank you for creating her:

She is quite lovely, @Afrodite-Ohki, thank you for creating her:

By far the nicest looking LF character I've seen.

I totally agree: one of the most beautiful LF ❤

😊

You people are too kind to me - thank you, I'm so glad you like my newest gal <3

And as usual, some gorgeous renders here!

Ok I've been in lockdown for over a week because a family member got covid, some time for a render!

Vanyar in the Traveler Van

lit only by a HDR in background node.

Beautiful render, very nice soft HDR lighting.

Indeed: the picture is awesome ❤

You know what? I'm in love of Afrodite's Hairs...