Cycles Cookbook

Hi all,

I love Cycles.  I just gotta say.  I'm opening old .blend files from when I was a wee little BlenderNewbie and redoing them in Cycles.  I figured we could share our Cycles renders and post our material settings.

I call this the 1980 IBM texture (in black instead of the typical beige color, though):
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And the environment is a simple black & white HDRI file from the Octane Render beta from a few years back.  It's just a rectangular file with white boxes on a black background.

[technicals: mesh is a plane distorted with the ANT landscape plug-in. Rendered at 1,000 samples. Blur used by the camera settings at .15 aperture and seven blades.]

Lovin' it!... and Cycles too! I love how it has the tendency to take the "crap" down a notch in my renders!  

Wow that looks great. Such a simple image but the Musgrave texture and the depth of field really sells it for me.

Not sure if this counts but I've been doing tutorials to learn cycles. So not strictly speaking my image. I would love this render if I could just work out how to get the noise down a bit.
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It's way too big to fit in video RAM so I'm on CPU render. Even on a hex core at 3500 cycles that's over 5 hours render time and still a lot of noise

Don't want to hijack the thread but any ideas? It's clamped at 100 I think at the minute.

Could you spare the .blend for us to fiddle with?

Er. Did I do something stupid here? I now seem to be the originator of this thread. Where did the first post go?

Blend file is nearly 300MB. And it contains textures I'm not supposed to redistribute so I probably shouldn't share it without pulling them out.... which sort of defeats the object!

Thanks for the offer though.

Ahhhh, I see... well then... uh, let me think on this! Oh, and by the way, yeah... where did Bunnie's post go?

What are you guys talking about? It's up above Strangebloke's post. <crazies>

Hmmmm.... I coulda....  

But.... but...

It had gone! I swear it wasn't there and it even showed me as being the originator of the thread.

Xray saw it too, I aint crazy..honest!