Thanks ;-)

Yeah, I was also grateful for never having bought an Arnold license when I heard that Marcos sold out in the end.
For me Arnold wasn't that hot anyway, since I don't have a renderfarm.

So in the end, Thea Render was a much better choice since it's the “real deal” and very fast for what you get even before they added GPU support. Since the preview is extremely fast, I could do the final renderings overnight if necessary. Now with GPU & CPU, it's about 10 to 100 times faster than Mantra/Arnold, depending on the scene - some things it eats for toast where Mantra struggles a lot.
I currently wait to learn more about the direction Thea will go now that it was bought by Altair. I fear the chance of it getting integrated into Houdini are very very tiny… :-(

Cheers,

Tom

Great images Thomas. Any chance on a tutorial regarding those growth techniques? Might come in handy for future characters I have in mind and I'm sure others would appreciate it too.

Well, the differential linegrowth etc is well documented here:
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/25534-differential-curve-growth/#comment-148345 [forums.odforce.net]
Entagma also has Tutorials on it.
The “shortest path” structures I mostly translated from my work in Grasshopper.
I can give you a quick intro - the basics are very simple: You define a couple of start- and end-points on any kind of grid/mesh (as groups) and the algorithm then finds the shortest paths between them on the grid and returns those paths as polylines. This gives you the basic structure if you for instance define one start point on the edge of a circle and all other edge-points as endpoints. From there it's massaging the starting grid itself and the parameters of the shortest path node to get interesting forms. Sometimes I also convert to NURBS curves afterwards for smoother lines.
The main problem is, that you get tons of overlapping lines which Mantra does not like at all… ;-)

Cheers,

Tom