I spotted a new species in our garden this morning. A grey partridge (agerhøne in Danish) calmly strolled by. It has been years since I saw one. It was far off at the other end of the meadow. There were no time for tripod and such, so this was point and shoot with full zoom. About three days ago a common redstart (rødstjert in Danish) sat on the fence to the meadow. That was also a first for our garden, but alas, it was long gone, before I was back there with my camera ready. 
I have been working in the free open source 3D creation program Blender. I learnt to use the cycles render feature today, even though it was technically super confusing to me at first. But I like my result with this tiny pearl and gold ring.
It has a very low poly count, meaning the shape of the object is defined with as few points as possible. It’s good for 3D games, where the computer has to deal with moving scenes, but less ideal for rendering super detailed, static, 2D images. It’s always a balance to find an acceptable level of details, that wont be too costly to deal with for computers. Because of the low poly count, the ring has some rugged edges and some harsh black shadows.
Making the metal texture look like gold with the reflections and all was a challenge – involving learning to use HDRI images for lighting the scene. But making the pearl texture was the real hard task in this project.
Pearls are not just white. Their mixed colors makes them beautifully iridescent in places. Light bounces off them and a bit through them too, plus the surface is not just perfectly smooth. With a lot of trial and error, and a lot of research, to see how other artists dealt with the challenge, I think it worked out OK in the end.
Rendering the ring took the computer almost an hour. I bet I could have nearly drawn it all on paper in that time too! But since the ring only exists in my imagination and now in the computer, that was not really possible. All in all this was a nice test project to try out new features and effects and learn how to use them.
