It’s taken close to 40 hours so far, but here’s what the latest version of my Skindigo manipulated raygun looks like. It’s still rendering, and I’ll probably stop it sometime today or perhaps this weekend – although I am sort of curious how long it will take to render anything completely, so I may leave it.

I assume certain materials are going to take longer to render than others, and I figure maybe glass wasn’t the best choice for an experiment, but I set the image size so small I thought it would render much faster. Next attempt will have no lights, and no glass. Then I’ll see if there is any difference.

Here’s another image of a rendering I stopped a couple days ago. I thought it was going to turn out awesome, but the anodized aluminum texture I used (SU default material) looked like shit so I stopped it.

I also noticed a few changes I wanted to make. Although the glass trigger looks cool in my opinion, it’s impractical. The glass iron sight let too much light through and almost disappears against a white background. I switched the trigger material to look like shiny plastic, but thought changing the camera angle would suffice for the iron sight – it didn’t (as you can see above).

I don’t think it should take me 40+ hours to render a 480×320 image. I need a super machine and lots of money if I’m ever going to make something super cool. I’d love to try rendering all kinds of my models with sweet material properties, but a) my computer would die, and b) what’s the point?