Whales

Partially inspired by Kamwei Fong’s Bo Goldfish http://www.coroflot.com/kamwei/Bo-Sculpture and an attempt to develop a material with a cracked glaze effect like this: http://pixabay.com/en/salt-shaker-bamboo-mat-mata-bamboo-188532/

It think it’s fair to say that the material needs quite a lot of work. It’s currently set up so that there are three meshes, a core layer with the diffuse colour, a solidified layer with a few layers of cell fracture applied to it (easy to say, hilariously complicated to make work), and an glossy layer so that the surface doesn’t pick up the cell fracture edges.

Depressingly, an earlier demo of the texture looks better in some ways, having a much more subtle effect, but I was set on getting that glowy, refracted look where the edges of the cracks have a dramatic effect on the illumination of each cell. I spent a long time experimenting with fresnel inputs to try and highlight the edges perpendicular to the camera to try and scatter the light into each cell, and even tried volumetric scatter or subsurface scattering on the inner diffuse layer (either of which still might work, but the effect was so noisy that I couldn’t effectively tune it.

Technically this is a work in progress, since I’m using staggered renders to smooth out the noise. Rendering the image at 100 samples takes about 6 hours on my desktop, and this is a combination of four renders. I’m still seeing noticable improvement with each render, so there will probably be a few more to go before I call it finished, but obviously the model and lighting are fixed now.

Still, critique on the model, texture and lighting would be appreciated.

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light bounces help reduce noise, and sample clamping.

I usually clamp direct samples at 3.00 and indirect samples at 2.00

This is my usuall light bounce setup, you may want to tick no caustics though. as this will reduce noise further, but its up to you because caustics add to realism in some scenes -

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