My 2005 Christmas Card design. Wanted to try out a simple studio shot of a complex natural object, thus I chose a snowflake. The modelling was really fast and took around 30 minutes. The shader on the back plate and the ground are both dgs shaders, but with very different settings. the shader of the flake is a glass physics phenomenon with the IOR set to match ice. there is only one light in the scene, with no GI nor Final Gather. Extensive post-processing in photoshop inlcuded selective blurring, contrast, levels, one high-passed layer set in overlay mode and a graient map to give it the blue hue, also, a very slight specular bloom effect was added to exaggerate the highlights.
render took 16 hrs @ 2400x3200 @ 16min/16max samples (to get a nice, clean blur with the dgs material on the ground plane). post-processing took roughly 3 hours.
enjoy!!
>> Hi resolution image <<