Sonolumina, the Little Cold Fusion-powered Robot

[CryptoQuick]

It all started when I was discussing Robin Williams films with a friend-- What Dreams May Come, Patch Adams, Bicentennial Man... and then, we came to Flubber. I had said something like, the flubber was awesome, but what if the flubber were replaced with a form of cold fusion? I would have given Weebo a bigger role, as it would replace the flubber, and Weebo would be powered by cold fusion. I remembered a movie that came out around the same time starring Keanu Reeves and Morgan Freeman, and I remember they used a somewhat popular cold fusion concept of that day, which is known as sonoluminescence. From this brainstorm came the cold fusion-powered robot!

Anyhow, I'm learning a lot doing this project. I set out to do this so that I could hone my skills with Blendigo. I also wanted to make something that looked cool, with neat lighting and SSS.

I'm still working on this project, hence its presence in the WiP forum.

Things I will be adding in terms of geometry and materials:
* Headphones (because of acoustic cavitation, duh)
* Finish the plasma helixes, giving them ends
* Add glass lenses to the ends of the 'eyes' to keep mesh emitters from shining directly into the camera, I think this screws up the lighting of the scene somehow...
* A layer of glass over portions of the plastic just to see how that might look
* I was thinking that instead of a black backdrop, maybe I'd make it so it'd look like the robot was traveling through a very long corridor.

Some questions I still have are:
* Right now I've got a cavity inside the sphere by having another sphere with the normals flipped inside. Would it be better to do something with material precedence, instead?
* The nkdata for Cobalt gives me an error saying something about 'complex IOR'... Why is that?
* Should SSS work equally well lit from the inside rather than outside? I suppose so, yeah?
* The biggest problem with this scene is lighting, I think. I have three mesh emitters that spew (technical term) 100W over 1000lm/W. Is this a good idea or bad idea? I don't really know how it all works, really... I think the trick to this scene is finding how to balance the light from all the emitters so that when it reaches the camera, some parts don't outside others, right? Or am I completely off-base here?

[Vampyre]

i wish i could answer any of your questions.. but i love your lil bot.
what u gonna name him?

[CryptoQuick]

That's alright, Vampyre. I think I'll just continue to call him Sonolunina. Thanks.

[Kram1032]

The SSS question is hard to answer... How more or less effective it is, to lit it from inside, depends on the material itself and on how you'd lit it from outside...

cobalt probably is one of the broken nks...

http://deeppixel.uw.hu/projects/NK_materials.html search through this list to find a material, you'd like (ah, don't wonder about transparent nks. All of them render very dark, close to black, instead of transparent, as they're phongs and not speculars )

Precedence is most likely faster than meshes. As you're using perfect spheres, you could use the sphere primitive, if you don't do so, already

Light is hard. It really depends on what you aim on. How should the robot look like?
Cute?
Scaring?
Dramatic?
Or maybe, "simply" well lit?