Berk's Forumvine

I am a beginner artist and animator in Blender 3D. These are incredibly well put together! I always have trouble with textures and lighting, so WOW

Okay, a little constructive criticism that I am not qualified to give XD
There are a lot of fireflies (noise) in the renders. While it would take longer to render, I recommend turning up your sample size in your render settings. That gives a smoother render. Also, I presume you are, but if not, use Cycles Render. It gives better light results. (I think you know this already, but I’ll say it anyway)

I wish I was this skilled! These are amazing

Thanks guys for the support!!

@WoW and Tech - yup, I know about the noise. My works are rendered usually at 32-64 samples (classic path-tracing) or 16-32 samples (branched path-tracing for animation and some complex stills), and never above 128 for stills (I use Cycles exclusively ). I simply don't have the computing power to go beyond that and keep up convenient rendertimes. Essentially, when I double the number of samples, the noise levels reduce sqrt(2) times (yes, there is the multiple importance sampling which helps with that, but in some scenarios like DoF, motion blur and volumetrics, the sqrt(2) rule applies).

So to get decent results, I'd have to put the number of samples between 300-500, and that's... not exactly convenient for my poor little laptop heheh... especially when I use PBR-compliant reflection shaders for everything.

Which is why I'm going to depend on the new denoiser that will come with Cycles in Blender 2.79 very soon. I already used it on those GIFs which have clouds.

ooh! A denoiser will be very helpful! And I didn't realize you were on a laptop . My craptop can't keep up at all, so I use a desktop.
And same here about the high sample sizes. I can't go above 100 samples without having a 20 hour render time

@Puff
Wow, this is amazing. I had no idea that there were other Blender enthusiasts here! I'm no longer alone!

These renders are just incredible! I wish I had a computer capable of doing things like this, but my laptop is just not powerful enough. I can do some Blender work, but rendering with Cycles (with a decent amount of quality) in a timely manner is simply too demanding for my little 2 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, and 2.5 GB of memory at my disposal. Comes of using a (relatively) old computer, I guess.

Proof of age: The 'designed for' sticker says "Windows XP (Windows Vista capable)" I use almost exclusively Linux.

Oh well. Maybe I'll have a go at it anyway. Is there any way you could share some of your .blend files for some of those scenes with me? I'd love to look through them!