skeletal hand

It doesn't look like much but the hand required a lot of modelling - something which none of my earlier posts never had. This also served as a small brush-up on texturing. Like the image of the candle floating on water, subsurf scattering worked miracles on the finale image.

The file for the mesh plus the materials is available. It is high-resolution and anatomically correct up to some degree. Not only does it include the hand it includes the radius and ulna, two bones that make up the forearm. Feel free to alter it and render it in your image.

To access it, click on the link provided

http://cid-ea40627868c69dba.office.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public?lc.=4105 and download the .blend file labeled as 'skeletal hand.' In some cases, because the file is 4.8 mb, it might prove to big. So, I will be uploading a zipped or compressed version shortly.

Diamonds

With my experience, I quickly learned that Blender's internal renderer isn't the type of renderer that I really wanted. It was too slow, often freezed my PC, and its materials tab was difficult to grasp. Also, it wasn't able to close until it finished the rendering process. I spent some time researching for 3rd party programs and found a couple. There were quite a few available: Vray, Luxrender, Yafaray, Indigo, and Maxwell Render. Looking for something not complex, I switched to Yafaray. Unlike blender's renderer, this supported caustics, an optical phenomena I needed for 'Diamonds.'

For basics, this site offers a diversity of tutorials for lighting, camera settings, render settings etc. :http://yafaray.org/documentation/userguide

For properly creating a proper environment: http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/tutorials/studiolighting

For a full discription explaining different methods of rendering yafaray support:http://www.yafaray.org/documentation/userguide/lightingmethods

Finally, I was able to finish the scene during the March Break. Through this, I learned of dispersion, absorbsion, photon mapping, pathtracing, and caustics. For 'Diamonds,' I used photon mapping as the primary rendering method.

A option called Raydepth really defined the diamond-like look. It defined the number of light bounces inside the mesh. A good number is 8 to 11. Anything below that makes the diamond look black because, I'm guessing, it absorbs the lighting without letting it bounce off.

Another effect called dispersion is also pretty amazing. From what I understood, it let the light that bounces off refract into individual wavelenghts.

An example of depersion...

Clay render is an extremly useful option available in yafaray. It renders the image without any materials. It is useful for testing out any meshes to see how it turns out.
Here is the same image with a darker background and a lower gamma. For those who don't know, gamma increases the brightness in a scene.

The diamond wasn't difficult to put together. The mesh was modeled on a brilliant cut, a unique type of diamond shape. The only risk was in working with Yafaray. However, Yafaray was not as hard as I expected. Most importantly, Yafaray was accurate, quick and easy.

Candle

This a more of a smaller project of mine. Because of a long break I had from Blender, this was just to refresh my memory. The big thing I learned from this was subsurface scattering. Because of the physics of light waves, The color reflected back is affected by the object it comes in contact to. This, I think, is a correct and brief discription of what it does.

Below, is an image without subsurface scattering. Note that this has a subsurface scattering of .1. Thus, the area the color of the light is mixed with the color of the object is smaller. Anything higher creates a warm blurry glow. For this, I used an area of 1 to achieve the wax material

Another major tool I learned was the wave modifier. The wave modifier lets you create simple waves, ripples, wakes without using the memory-consuming physics engine. It allows decent effects combined with a quick understanding for its capability. All in all, after this break, I plan to exlore more complex and attractive 'projects.'