Dusted off the old Magical Crystal Compass Rose

[Robbie]

I am using emission on the gems...I actually have a 3d gradient ramp based on object space to make it lighter in the center of the gem and darker on the outside and I really like it, lol. I only had the emission strength at 1, which is the same as the background lighting so I upped the emission to 10 so it will actually light the surfaces around it...Had to scale it down and darken the glow, but I do like it a bit more...It's much more extreme now, but I think it's more atmospheric. Also I modeled a dip pen and killed off the feather.

As for the illumination, you can even see some light escaping from underneath the base from the bottom of the center gemstone illuminating the table. I also softened up the shadows a tiny bit...may try for more.

[Falconius]

I am using emission on the gems...I actually have a 3d gradient ramp based on object space to make it lighter in the center of the gem and darker on the outside...

That's a cool idea. I wish I could think of things like when doing these sorts of things. Still the problem is that being emmisive also makes it look cloudy, you literally get the same sort of effects with subsurface scattering. The problem me and I believe the others are running into is they don't look like gems, even bad ones, gems tend to be rated on their clarity and how shiny they are. Even poor gems that are described as cloudy are cloudy with intriguing or organic detail.

I like the new pen, it looks spot on just about. The divider IS spot on. I'm definitely a fan of that ink pot, you might consider putting some ink stains near the lip, but honestly that may also ruin the effect. The carving on the table or scratches have interference from the texture on top of them, you can actually make a texture mask that block the texture from going over the scratches (or at least I remember seeing something like that once). The one thing that actually doesn't read well material wise is the red part of the compass, to me it looks like anodized aluminum, but the splotches kind of don't make sense to me.

Edit: Saw your post over on the Blender forums, I hope they give you some feed back. Unfortunately the forum over there has no where near the same vitality that your forum does over here