“A Piece of Sky.” My first foray into rendering grass in Cycles. The render is a bit noisier than I would like, mostly because of the refractive material on the skypiece. But let’s just pretend the noise is fairy dust and an intentional part of the picture.
“Heartstone.”
“Terraforming.” A fractally subdivided icosphere.
“The Extinguishing of the Torchtemples.” Some extruded cubes and planes.
“Rebel Council.” I couldn’t figure out how to make a procedural spiral texture in Blender, so I used the twirl filter in Photoshop and UV mapped it onto the lollipops. I also used the ANT Landscape addon for the hills.
“Talisman.” I didn’t have as much time today, so this is a bit more thrown-together than earlier pieces. It’s a beveled and tapered path with a UV map (painted in Photoshop) and an unhealthy amount of gloss. Mild postprocessing in Photoshop.
“Heart of a Dying Ship.” Ever since Cycles came out I’ve hardly used the Blender internal renderer, but since Cycles doesn’t yet have volumetrics, here we are. For the background I subdivided a cube several times and gave it a red halo material (making all those red dots). Then I created a honeycomb matrix, extruded it, and gave it a volumetric material with some colored lights scattered around inside. The torus knot also has a volumetric material, and the white energy core in the center is just a sphere with a white emitting light. Finally, in post I dialed up the chromatic aberration and lens distortion, which ended up creating the rainbow effect around the edges.
“Exodus.” Going for the low-poly look. I’m also going to try to make sure the rest of these daily renders have some kind of story to them.
“Dancing Table at the Top of the World.” Just some playing around with the cloth sim. It was somewhat frustrating since Blender kept crashing, and the checkerboard texture had some weird bug that kept messing up the texture unless I unplugged the node and then plugged it back in again. So I didn’t polish it as much as I would have liked — I was lucky to get this render without it crashing. (That said, this is the only time I’ve had Blender act so unstable on me. In general it works great.)
“Candyworm.” A beveled curve hanging out on some checkerboard planes.