grain

I am a big fan of, and always use Neat video. Gets me out of a jam when I need to turn around renders quickly with octane. Altus Denoiser is meant to be great as well however it requires you render lots of supplementary passes to make it work. Otoy are talking about integrating it in the future, similar to Vray and Thea (or is it Corona? I forget). Navie is a great plugin but it's always super slooow to update (I think it's the one guy doing all the code for it, and it's basically realflow). If he's making a deNoiser you can bet it'll be amazing and come out in about 2 years.

Hahaha this guy. Awesome, good luck in the industry.. *5 years later* Hi there grain i'm your boss vanbohle! Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Nice work! - As vector said, it's way too long. I think the music track is working against it a bit, the tempo and vibe of the track is pretty chilled which makes it feel longer. I'd chop out some of the Mograph Dynamics stuff (coloured balls flying around the shapes) as that's pretty basic tutorial stuff, stick to the more commercial looking pieces. Be really critical about your own stuff, only put in the absolute cream. But yes, overall, great work.

The results are already awesome, great work guys. Looking forward to seeing final renders.

ACT like canberra? Nice one mate. Looks great, and I'll look forward to seeing what you do next.

Thanks guys!

Cheers Vector!

Cheers! Thanks, yes it's exciting times.

I've recently started a small studio, Lightfield, and here's the first studio reel! Check it out. http://lightfield.studio/showreel/

Existe - yes in my tests I've found it quite slow compared to octane, I'm probably doing something wrong. In some tests the CPU was faster than my 5 GPUs .. must be doing something wrong. It's fast for glass and specular stuff though, octane falls down if you do that stuff. Redshift is faster as well. More research needed!

Just saw this - great work mate, really coming along. I am cr@@p at modelling but have found 3D Coat makes retopo easy (not that you need to worry now, nice job). Looking forward to seeing how this develops, congrats. *edit - who knew cr @ p was a swearword!

Oh it's the artist using the software, totally. That reel seems to have 2 or 3 artists contributing and I think that the guy doing the particles (Mario Tran Phuc, probably) is awesome. I haven't written it off, in fact I purchased it 2 hours ago. Still excited!

I totally agree. It's all over the place in terms of quality, some nice stuff (I love the Xparticles trails that look fibre optic at 1.24).. but man there's some really dodgy stuff in there. That jet flying around, the lamborghini.. fireflies, aliasing.. definitely not showreel worthy stuff.

All you can do is get it for the first year, see if you like it, and go from there. Who knows, the pound might be worth 80 cents next year and you'll be cheering! It was worth $1.50 about 4 months ago.. sigh. I totally respect that for hobbyists and people not earning their living from doing this then that is a bit steep, and it's a real financial consideration. I'm fortunate enough to be doing this professionally so the cost of software is something I just factor in every year.

I have faith in these guys. Xparticles is probably the plugin I enjoy and use most, so I trust that this will be a really solid release. 90 quid per year isn't crazy compared to some other plugins / renderers and if it lets them continue to maintain the plugin up to date with whatever Blender is doing, that'd be worth it alone. Very exciting times.

Pikachu with a shotgun! Excellent stuff!

Open CL works on both ATI and Nvidia. From what I understand performance isn't the same across both, but at least it functions on ATI. So for all those long-suffering mac users who've been left out of the GPU funky show.. it's great news! Now I need to school up on Prorender - I'd never heard of it. So many render engines right now!

There quite a lot of great modelling, FX and rendering stuff in there.

Before R18 there was pixelberg which did a lot of what you are talking about (sans GI) http://frostsoft.blogspot.co.uk/p/fssoftware.html It's definitely something that's happening, at the moment we're just seeing the GPU tech advance to the point where this is on the horizon. I've heard it said that game engines are the render engines of the future, and it makes sense the more you play with things like Unreal and Unity. At the moment they're not perfect, but you can achieve amazing results if you know what you're doing modelling and texture wise. You'll still need to render feature quality VFX for quite some time though, simulations and volumetrics are still way too heavy for GPU processing. Otoy are creating a realtime cloud-based version of Octane called Brigade which merges unbiased rendering with realtime performance. There will be many other similar techs being developed like this soon I'd say (if there isn't already). Bit of a rambling comment - TL;DR it's an interesting topic that will only get more compelling as GPU tech gets faster.

The last picture - I didn't realise they were a progression though. It's not bad though, perhaps you could play with a bit of SSS in the shader and make the specular a bit rougher (not so super shiny). Sometimes photo reference helps eg

Totally agree with this. Hardly anybody (self included) dedicates the proper amount of time to understanding how one renderer works, let alone multiple. Has a lot to do with the skills of the artist as well. Only render comparison tests I've found interesting are completely scientific scenes comparing specific renderer features, like how long it takes for good caustics etc.

Looks a bit like polished stone, or bitumen, but keep going with it!

Nice skin texture! I'd love to see a different body mesh, man, that guy has been hanging around in people's test renders for years now ;) I don't use Vray very much but when I was learning it this guy Grant Warwick was the man - he really explains how to optimise the samples and get render times down. You may have already seen his stuff, it's mostly for 3ds max Vray, but it's still really useful.

Ha you're getting some proper crits here - I think that head looks great, and you say you started 4 weeks ago? Wow, what a start. I think it would be interesting to see a wireframe so we could look at the topology. This can really highlight any problem areas that need work. I like that full-frame mega DOF look however it sort of looks like you might be hiding the ears (understandable, who wants to model ears! ha) The lips looks weird as mentioned above, it seems the modelling is OK but the texture is bonkers. Eyes look OK just a little underworked. I'm not a modeller really so I'm very impressed, to me it seems like you've got the base there you just need to work into it. Nice one..!

If you've got the adobe suite, media encoder makes a good h264 / mp4 (there are a lot of presets). For another free option have a look at Handbrake, it's for PC and Mac and creates awesome .MP4 files. Currently I'm working on a job with a crazy 4kx2k delivery spec and it can compress a 10 gig 3 minute uncompressed file into a 500mb MP4 with comparable quality.