Underrated in the Kayo thread - The Fighting Ring

The Blurst of Times

So, I was revisiting something from Kayo-8 times because after I got down to using it, it's actually kind of a gem for anyone who needs a modern arena setting.

(Translating to wrasslin speech.)
BAH GAWD, KING! THAT WRASSLIN RING IS PRETTY DARN GOOD!!!

So the ring itself is pretty standard. HOWEVER, the product comes with different pre-loaded Scenes that have baked-in crowds and area lights (via HDR).

That HDRI thing is a pretty good idea (BAH GAWD, KING!). The arena & arena lighting you see in the promos? You actually get that in this package. It takes a relatively simple product and elevates it to something quite handy, and possibly useful for other things (like an arena-type rock concert, for instance).

It also avoids the need to duck around with setting up an audience for all of those things. You just load the Ring Scene, and you can go from there.

Downside? The scenes are kind of heavy to render out of the box. There's a LOT of Reflectivity in the prop/Surfaces, which causes a lot of bounce for Iray to calculate. Also, the Scene render settings have Bloom enabled (another thing that can eat up render cycles), and I don't think the Bloom setting does enough to warrant the time it takes to render with it enabled. (I can do more via simulated Bloom in GIMP/PS than wait for Bloom to render out in DS.)

I took out the Bloom, messed around in GIMP on this image (but not with light/tone levels). This is more or less how it renders.