looks a lot better. the furshading especially.

Thanks ^^ setting up the fur shaders for this new render engine took a lot of tweaking, but I think they're finally in a good place.

^_^

the shading here is so much better, plus this has to be one of most adorable looking portratis I've seen

*Blushes* Awhh, thanks I'm happy you think so. I need to get this set up as my new icon now.

Holy Dog, your everything has improved tremendously in such a short period of time! Good job!

Thanks so much ^^ I put in a lot of work this month to learn the new render engine so that I could put out higher quality work.

Looks great! I see more fur detail, or just more fur in general. Looking good!

Thanks a lot ^^ and yeah, I'm using a new fur shader which makes the fur, and overall lighting a lot more realistic.

cycles fur looks amazing, i'm gonna hafto learn that.

fur shader?

Yeah, for a while cycles didn't have a hair shader, so I just used their base diffuse shader with a few others added on through nodes.

Though they added a hair shader in the most recent release, and I use that with a few other shaders to get a result I like. It's mainly a fur shader, drawing it's color from a UV image texture. The UV texture also connects to the color port of a glossy shader. The glossy and hair go into a mix shader with about 90%hair and 10%glossy. The mixed result goes into another mix shader that combines: 40% previous mix shader with 60% transparent shader. It gives the fur a really nice and soft look. Without the transparent shader the fur looks really rough and a little overdone.

This looks great.
I may have to get something from you again.

Thanks ^^ Slots are filling up pretty quickly. If you've got something in mind then shoot me a note and we can talk details.

ooohhh nice i am liking the texture well done

Thanks^^ I'm glad you think so

your welcome ^.^

You need abouttttttttttt 2000 samples normally, if you have a GPU that supports it turn it on and make your sample size quite largee, otherwise on CPU set it to like 16x16
oh
um
All you need now is some texturing on the nose, eyes and tongue and this'll be perfecttt ;v;

Thanks, I'm pretty new to cycles so I'm still learning all of this. Though what do you mean by 16 x 16 for CPU?

I know my graphics card says it's CUDA enabled, so I should be able to GPU render, but I haven't quite been able to get it to work yet.

Ahh, awesome! You'll soon find out how much easier cycles is and never go back, haha

And go Render Settings -> Performance Tab -> Tiles, if you have a multi-core CPU it's better to use a smaller tile size, 16x16 seems to be the sweet spot. You can fiddle with it and see what works for you, haha.

Ahh, that's simple. In your settings [the user preferences thingy], go to System Tab -> Somewhere in bottom left you should see Compute Device. Set that to CUDA, then under your Render Settings -> Render Tab [very top usually] where it says Feature Set change it to CUDA. If you don't see it there go Experimental then CUDA will pop up

If you need anything else I could always show ya [like texture nodes, gosh those are fun and crazy fast] o v o