Hi!

> I made a few ojects out of glass material with photons...is this a good 
> idea? 
Rendering something with POV-Ray is always a good idea :)

> Would it be a good idea to reduce the transparency of the material in 
> order to speed up the rendering? 
That won't help in most cases: What makes reflection and refration so 
time-consuming is that POV-Ray has to shoot both a new ray for the 
reflection and the refraction. That does not depend on how transparent 
the object is (only if it *is* transparent). So both

pigment { rgb <1,1,1> transmit 0.9 }

and

pigment { rgb <1,1,1> transmit 0.1 }

will render with the same speed.
There's one setting, though, were this could make a difference: 
adc_bailout, which basically says that if the change in color 
contributed by the additional refracted ray is smaller than the given 
threshold, no more "refractive rays" will be shot (for that pixel).

> Would disabling radiosity be the only answer?
I'm no pro with radiosity, but you got both radiosity and area lights in 
your scene, and those are among the big render-time-killers (other 
candidates are photons and isosurfaces). Perhaps you can either go with 
less radiosity quality (see rad_def.inc for some examples) or replace 
that area light by a normal point/spot-light.

> Any tips on improving with time?
With a scene as simple as yours, the things I mentioned above are 
perhaps everything you can do. One must-read-tutorial about rendering 
speed is Mike's Holes Tutorial:

http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/holetut/index.htm


HTH,
Florian
-- 
camera{look_at-y*10location<8,-3,-8>*10}#local a=0;#while(a<999)sphere{
#local _=.01*a-4.99;#local p=a*.01-5;#local c=.01*a-4.995;<sin(p*pi)*5p
*10pow(p,5)*.01>sin(c*c*c*.1)+1pigment{rgb 3}}#local a=a+1;#end
/******** http://www.torfbold.com ******** http://www.imp.org ********/

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