Zen and the Art of Cycles

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In my continuing exploration of the unfathomably amazing program that is Blender, I have now moved on to ponies (as I am known to do in every medium I touch ). This piece serves as practice for merging multiple elements, basic manipulation of rigged models, and three different Cycles materials.

As you can see, those materials are glass (Applejack), glossy (Luna), and hair particle effects (Derpy). I really like how the hair effect looks, and it was a ton of fun to implement. You get to comb and smooth and puff it right on the model, like it's one of those brushable toys, but super high-tech.

Unfortunately, my graphics card doesn't have enough memory to render a smooth amount of body fur for Derpy with the rest of the scene in place, but it sure looked awesome when I was setting up the models. I even had a Flufflederp version (basically this cs424425.vk.me/v424425401/2edd… ). I also had to disable caustics on this one, because good golly, y'all, I'd need a full-blown render farm to pull that off without noise (in any time shorter than a week, at least). As it stands, I did 4000 samples with limited global illumination and no caustics, and there's STILL noise in some places. Oh well. Most of it looks awesome.

Render time: 8 hours

Ponies: Modified from www.blendswap.com/blends/view/… by MirceaKitsune, originally by KP-ShadowSquirrel

Environment: www.blendswap.com/blends/view/… by Ermmus.

If you want the modified pony models, ask me. I had to use a script on an old version of blender to make them cycles compatible.

Edit: Changed to a max quality JPG, now the file is 5MB instead of 40. I'm used to vectors, for which PNGs compress extremely well. I suppose photo-style stuff doesn't work that way.

Edit: HI EQUESTRIA DAILY!!!