Chris Maryan wrote:
> 
> Remember those original overdrive chips that turned a 486-66 to a
> pentium-83. I have one of those and 32MB RAM. Overnight for you means
> three days for me. Maybe I'll take a shot at doing something simple like
> a mirrored ball on a checkered plane :-)
> 

Don't be too discouraged by some people's high render times with photons...
usually, adding photons doesn't do any worse than double the render time (which
isn't that good... but it is usually not even that bad).  If you set the proper
settings (using ignore_photons for glass/mirror objects and for objects that
for sure won't get hit by photons), render times can actually be pretty good.

A big tip (I'll make a FAQ/Tips page eventually) is to make sure that all of
the FINAL densities of photons are of the same general magnitude.  You dont
want spots with really high density photons and another area with really low
density photons.  You'll always have some variation (which is a good thing),
but having really big differences in photon density is what causes some scenes
to take many hours to render.

For example, Spider recently posted a nice image lit completely by photons
which took 14+ hours to render.  However, with a few modifications to the
densities and radii, I was able to cut that down to just a few hours (I only
rendered at 640x480, but it took less than 1.5 hours for me on a similar
computer).

So... I suggest you try out some scenes... just keep the photon count low.  A
few weeks ago I also only had 32 megs (recently upgraded to 96), and I was
rendering test scenes with around 500,000 photons with no problems.

-Nathan

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