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Starfish Blender

I just finished the scene for the Starfish I did some time ago to show the possibilities of Material Nodes in Blender. Rendertime was horrible (> 30 hours, I can’t give any exact number because I paused the render a few times to work on my windows partition which confuses the render-time counter of Blender). Simple reason: Node-Material with about 5 different materials on a glossy reflection surface with about 20 passes, giving about 20×5 reflections per pixel to compute (most of them with SSS).

In this case, the workflow was:

  • Render to multilayer exr
  • Load result into new blender-file only for compositing
  • Composite basics (depth of field, gamma curve, saturation)
  • Try some changes for parts of the image in Gimp
  • Export manipulation masks from Gimp
  • Imitate Gimp-manipulation inside the Blender compositor using the masks from Gimp
  • Compute final composition (takes some minutes with the heavy dof)
  • Postwork in Gimp (e.g. wet paper after a hint from the forum, hand-antialiasing on important edges (full sample is not possible here, so rendering at 1,5x the size, scaling down and then hand-antialiasing is the method of choice))

And if someone is interested, a commented Node-setup:

Compo-Nodes with comments

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Julian Herzog Written by: