Invisible wrote:
> Well, maybe my scenes aren't complicated enough then. Usually if I just 
> insert an empty radiosity{} block, I get a reasonable image. Sometimes I 
> have to tweat a few parameters and then it looks good. Occasionally it 
> just becomes so absurdly slow that I give up.

default radiosity settings look hardly any better than just simple flat 
ambient lighting.  If radiosity is not getting your render above 1 hour, 
then it's really not doing much.

> But then, as you know, most of my renders are pretty trivial. For 
> example, the image attached to the first post in this thread. I have no 
> idea how the hell it's possible to model something that complicated. 
> Surely something like that must take many months of modelling?

no, most probably a couple of hours in a visual modelling package like 
Blender or Wings 3D.  Many people actually just reuse premade models and 
just work on composition, texturing and lighting.  The real hard work is 
in the rendering, but this is now mostly automated.  You just say "use a 
bright clear sky at 16:00" or "the lamps should be 160W fluorescent" and 
let it go.

>>> And that's the kind of worrying part - how many years will you have 
>>> to wait for the result from an unbiased renderer?

on quad-cores, fidos has been posting slightly noisy results in the 11 
hour range.  In other more mature ubiased renderers, 10-20 hours on 
powerful hardware already give pretty good results for scenes much more 
complex than just RSOCP...

Post a reply to this message