So, once again I felt like I didn’t need too much practice with the subjects gone over, so I took some of the aspects of this lesson (emission materials), and adapted them to continue to experiment with material properties. In this case, I found the glass BSDF, and managed to mix it with a “scratched metal” texture, which I recoloured, and then actually inserted a flame into the middle of the lanterns, which gives the lanterns that very specific glow pattern that almost looks like a vignette.
Also, now that I’m getting a lot more comfortable with blender, I’m finally feeling able to look up external tutorials on some aspects, and figured out how to make a fog/mist to add some additional atmosphere. These tutorials always left me feeling very overwhelmed before when I’ve tried to look into them, but I find Grant’s gamedev tutorials to be very confidence boosting in terms of helping me feel able to at least START understanding a lot more about blender in general, and getting comfortable with the software.
Addition: Does anyone know much about rendering with the GPU? I rendered the 2nd image on my computer using CPU rendering, with a 2700x and 32GB of RAM (my CPU is just and AMD 570 - it’s not capable of GPU rendering in Blender. Out of curiosity, I packed the textures into the blend file and had my husband try on his computer - I wanted to see how much faster it would render. He has I think at least a 3070, a better processor, the same amount of ram but likely faster - essentially, his PC should kick mine’s butt for rendering. We kept all the settings the same except change to GPU rendering and it seemed to render at the same speed. Are there some settings we need to change/check other than switching the drop down to GPU, in order to render faster on his computer? I was hoping to use his computer if I ever get to creating larger projects/videos, but if we can’t get it to render faster, there isn’t much point.