They both are beautiful and impressive artworks.

Personally, your latest render evokes a sense of warm cleanness. I take it as a sort of illumination of a dark but hopeful place.

Your earlier render feels more outdoorsy (but not necessarily more organic, if that makes any sense). It conveys to me more a spirit of perseverance in contrast to the first one.

That is to say, while everyone may have their own opinions, both pieces of art to me, are incredibly complex works, and you’re clearly insanely talented, so you make it hard to have a preference!

Your latest work does seem to have an incredible amount of meticulous work and effort put into the lighting, and this one seems to focus more on the background, but either way, they are stunning!!

Thanks! 😊

Thank you! It's a plane with a marble texture from Poly Haven, and then I mixed the roughness with a custom grunge map for some imperfection

Thanks! ✌️

Yeah I went for a value of 2 on caustics because I liked the magical effect, even though it's not physically accurate. Maybe should've stuck with 1 😅

Thanks! I look forward to hopefully seeing some of your stuff on here 😊

Blender has a steep learning curve and it can be pretty disheartening at the start (or certainly that's how it was for me). But the important thing is to stick with it, try to enjoy the process even if the result isn't what you hoped, and eventually you'll get there with enough tutorials and messing around.