Most of the simple scenes I've done have only taken a minute or two to
render, and maybe 10 to 20 minutes for a 640x480 renderer using AA.  The
animation I posted of the fish only took about 3 minutes per frame.

I kind of let the render time influence what I put in the scene.  I
might turn off either refraction or reflection to speed things up, or
break up unions so I get a more precise distribution of photons.  Under
good conditions the photon mapping is quite fast.  

-Mike

Nathan Kopp wrote:
> 
> 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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