the rendering time was long due to the DOF and the fact that the original is 3200 px wide (I think). It was 10-12 hours I believe.
Drosera - macro/DOF test, Kurt Singstad (3D)
system
#17
Luxology’s Nexus renderer definitely seems to be showing some legs. There’s a little too much gritty noise, but the reflection/refraction and light dispersion complexity in this is pretty inspiring to see.
danbaiton
#18
Any chance you could upload the 3200px wide version, wouldnt mind that as a background wallpaper! 
KurtS
#19
sure, HERE it is. But you will have to do some cropping to use it as wallpaper, and you will probably also notice that the noise is even more noticable in this size…
Magnus3D
#21
Great image Kurt and congratulations on making it to toprow! 
a well deserved spot for a well created image.
/ Magnus
Shogun-3D
#24
Hello.
It’s amazing, how some polygons of torus, extruded couple of times, smoothed, with proper glass material applied, wirh camera DOF and HDRI map in the background can give such a nice effect.
15 minutes of work + render have given you a CG talk front.
Respect.
ambient-whisper
#25
its like this with 2d as well. some artists know their strokes soo well that what they do in in 15 minutes could be considered pluggable. take most work by craig mullins. his work is very confident. this is very much the same. its simple, but it looks good, and thats why its plugged.
djart73
#28
Hello dear forumleaders, i once wonder again about you and the decisions you make?
Its not against you kurtS but, this work does not belong to the frontpage!
Its a slap in the face for all the artists working hard and long to create some images, which are totally great but will never be seen because they just fade away in the depths of CGTalk.
You might call me jealous now but this just isnt right!
Apart from that, nice DOF.
Greets djart73
ambient-whisper
#29
its not a slap in the face. i personally dont care if someone worked hard or didnt. the end result is what matters. if someone worked 10000 hours on something but it ended up looking like an over complicated image then no, i will not give it the time of day. simple as that.
also consider that we dont plug abstract pieces too often, so sometimes its nice to vary it up a bit instead of always showing character pieces. or always photo real pieces, etc.
so, does this image get a plug. YES because its a simple, soothing image to look at. will this image get a cg choice award?! most likely it wont because while it looks good, it would requite a lot more than this to get past the other forum leaders.
please dont question us what we plug. every forum leader plugs stuff that catches their eye. its up to them, and not what others find worthy of a plug.
Cyborgguineapig
#31
The simplicity of the wire frame and the awesomeness of the final image is something to respect. And nicely said Martin.
djart73
#32
Hmm, it seems youre right.
I was somehow upset, maybe i had a bad day.
I apologize for my harsh words and didnt want to harm anybody.
greets, djart73
snovak
#33
Wow… as everyone has said the DOF looks great! How long did this take to render? Woop, asked too soon. Found it. So, 10-15 hrs on what sort of hardware?
slowgolde
#35
Really love the image, I’ve just set it as my background too
I think the DOF looks perfect. Out of interest I’m assuming the current DOF is calculated during the beauty render? Did you do any experiments with how it might work just doing it in post with some sort of Zmaterial/zpass. It would be nice to know how would the macro/depth render compares, time wise, to just a standard render of the scene with no blur? I’ve always found post (PS/shake/Afterfx) to be the only real viable option for DOF animations. Speaking of which it would be lovely to see a camera move, but maybe that’s another project!
Great work
Oh, could you mention where the HDRI is from?