Voyage to the Sky, 'Revised'

Ugh. This one was a real pain. Blenders' 2.59 render compositing system is broken. I tried a different approach, rendering three layers, then saving it as a high-quality jpeg. Next I added a world texture, using the jpeg as the bitmap. I then rendered the final layer.

The clouds... belch. That's what I get for using Blenders volumetric material.

Tripod

In 1898 the Martians visited Earth.

In 1968 we return the favor.

My interpretation of what a human-made fighting-machine would look like.

Waterfall, revamped

After a good deal of effort, I was finally able to revamp the Waterfall to my satisfaction. The new background was a major pain to get right, and the render node compost system decided to cease working. For the most part, at least hal of the thing was an exercise in frustration.

On the other hand, I did make use of a bunch of new techniques. Baking a shadow map for the ferns and creating an intensity map turned out rather well.

Normals

Working with normal maps for inorganic objects turned out to be less complicated then I imagined it to be. On the other hand, getting the normals to show correctly has been a real pain.

Another update

I've been working on updating more of my older works, and this and another piece. I would have posted it as well, but every time I try to render it, or even look at the material it uses, it crashes.

Update, part duex

After struggling with insomnia, I managed to make several corrections to the scene, including the water, the sub-surface scattering, clouds, and lights.

Updates

After getting some feedback, I've updated two of my WC entries. The re-render of the Fire and Ice uses an enviromentat map to show the fires reflection, while the Strange Creature used several new lights, textures, and a normal map for the creature.

I'm not really sure if I like the camera angle or not.