One thing about Blender is that it’s huge. It’s dead hard to be across every single thing it can do. So taking on Blender can mean focussing your ambitions on one particular thing at the expense of others. For instance, i know stuff all about procedural shaders.

Another thing about Blender is its community and spirit of openness. Juan José Torres just created an awesome orange peel shader for Cycles and posted the material setup for it on his website. Thanks heaps!

Another thing again about Blender is that you can pull the source code from their repository and build your own version of it featuring freshly committed code – this way, you’re not waiting for official releases for killer new features.. as long as you don’t mind having slightly more unstable code. 🙂 This orange peel shader uses features that were added between releases. If you want to try it out for yourself but you can’t compile Blender for yourself, you can grab one of the newer builds of Blender from Graphicall.