Cycles studies #1

Hi guys! Here’s some studies of cycles materials I’ve been doing to level up my shading. These are inspired by Reynante Martinez’s work, I hope to make more in the future. I also took the chance to play with True Displacement. They are not super useful for real world work, but the node networks are full of little tricks and things to learn.

The galaxy image is from pixabay


Blend file

How to render
Welcome to Crash City

These materials use True Displacement which is an experimental feature. Make sure experimental is on (if it got disabled for some reason). Blender will die if you try to render (F12), or make changes while viewport is in rendering mode, or pretty much at any chance it gets. Also, no GPU.
This is the only reliable way I’ve found to render these:

  1. Make sure the object’s displacement is set to Bump (in mesh properties).
  2. Go to camera view and start rendering in the viewport
  3. Let it do 1 pass, and then switch the object to True Displacement
  4. Let it render until satisfied

If you want to save the render, check the “Chroma” world nodes and unmute the mix node (or switch to black hole world if you’re doing that). Let it render using the method above and save a screenshot. You can remove the green background in GIMP or Krita.

Individual Renders


(rest of the renders because BA doesn’t let me add them all on one post)




Not bad the lava doesn’t look natural, maybe a little too much displacement

Yeah, the noise was pretty hard to control in that one for some reason

Meteorite one looks awesome - very authentic.