More Cycles

In conjunction with using Cycles for animation (which looks pretty slick, although time consuming on account of there being no support for texture baking at the moment), I have been working on reducing noise and fireflies that present themselves often when using Cycles. I found a good combination is to use limited global illumination in the integrator to reduce the amount of caustic light bounces, turning off "sample as lamp" for most light sources, and kicking up samples to 1000-2000 for a still shot. Tried out using Cycles for my new resume design.

Stargate Temple

I've been wanting to jump into Blender's Cycles engine so I went ahead made this simple Stargate scene. Cycles is pretty amazing, to say the least. Way more robust than the old internal renderer. Reflectivity, bump mapping, and lighting is a lot more natural and realistic. Depth of Field has been rebuilt where you no longer need to use a compositing node and you don't get those bad looking artifacts when an object cant decide whether it should be in focus or out of focus. The best feature though is the real time renderer. You can edit, move, and model elements within your scene and have Blender constantly updating a low sample render view so you can see what your changes actually look like. No more, sitting around for a twelve hour render only to realize your texture isn't mapping right, or the lighting isn't strong enough.