The Knockouts - Medusa Victorious

So, imagine (if you've been reading The Knockouts over at Hipcomix) that Medusa figured out the Curator was going to screw her over and instead (handwave handwave) turned the tables?

Back row, left to right: Jinx, Anima, CodeBreaker, Ms Victory/Northern Light, CloudBreaker, HeartBreaker, BlazeBreaker and Wind Goddess. In front, the Curator and Starstorm. The Knockouts are the creation of MCtek.

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Now here's a lesson for you kids: multiple layers of transparency, subsurface scattering, and reflection don't play well together. I started this render on Monday night. By Thursday evening it was 78.1% done. After being 77.6% done Tuesday afternoon. And the reason is mostly Jinx. The hair she's got consists of multiple layers of geometry, and the marble shader used in the figures was the same one I used on the hair.

I knew it was going to be trouble. I didn't think it was going to be that much trouble. And the machine I was rendering this on is a box built specifically for rendering: big memory, dual hex-core Xeon processors, and doing nothing else.

Not wanting to tie up my rendering capability for another week or more, and not wanting to fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy, I terminated the render and went into the hair shader for all the characters, removing the reflection, and started again. A much more reasonable 17 hours to render, and really, acceptable results where the difference from the skin shader is barely noticeable. You'd need a closeup of the head to see there's no reflection, only a specular.

Thus ends the lesson.