"St." <dot### [at] dotcom> wrote in message news:41619798@news.povray.org...
>
> "Jeremy M. Praay" <jer### [at] questsoftwarecom> wrote in message
> news:41618bf1@news.povray.org...
>
>> So, I guess I'm just posting in order to see if anyone else wants to
> share
>> their thoughts.  Is anyone planning to cut it real close?
>
>    Probably me. It seems like I've got a bit more time than yourself
> though, with an image that will take around 14 hours to render without
> rad. Oh well...
>
>   Any idea what sort of time this would take with bog-standard rad
> settings for an outside sunny daytime scene?
>
>   Times three?
>

Try it and see? ;-)

I've done some outdoor radiosity scenes with very, very low radiosity 
settings.  If you set count to something like 20, set error_bound high 
(1.0), and set recursion limit to 1, your results may still look pretty 
good, and I doubt that it would significantly affect your render time. 
However, it very much depends on your scene.  For bright sunny outdoor 
scenes, you can sometimes get away with bad radiosity as long as you're not 
trying to show any deep shadow areas (like the side of a nearby house or 
something).  I used really low settings in Radio Graves (similar to what's 
described above) and Gilles mentions using really low settings for his The 
Darker Side of Trees scene.

Assuming you're like me and you have a job, you can render from 11pm until 
6pm the next day (19 hrs) and never notice that you're missing your 
computer.  That should be enough time to gather if your render is going to 
take significantly longer and if it's going to look any better or worse 
(even if only half done or less).  But maybe I'm just stating the obvious 
again.

I figured your scene was going to have ultra-high radiosity, a bazillian 
photons, super-fine focal blur, fifty 100x100 area lights, and include all 
types of media, with all objects being either spline-based CSG or 
iso-surfaces with complex difference operations.  ;-)  (Did I miss 
anything?)

-- 
Jeremy
www.beantoad.com