I realize the whole diamond craze is now over, but the reason I'm late with
this post is because of how long it took to render this image.

I took the diamond source from a few weeks back, put 3 diamonds into the
scene and changed the 3 spotlights to 3 5x5 area lights.  I also kept the
photons, but no radiosity.

The composition isn't great, but I'm not re-doing it.  :)

If you're thinking this took a long time, you are right.  I rendered it on a
few Sun Sparc Ultra 5's with 256MB of RAM.  I "borrowed" some co-worker's
machines during the night.  There were usually 3-5 machines rendering at the
same time.  I then stuck the parts back together and got this image.  The
parsing and photon generation took about 9 hours.  I saved the photon map
for the other renders.  The rending took around 690-720 hours.  I'm
estimating because I lost some log files.  The render used 138MB of RAM
except for the very first render which went to about 570MB to generate the
photon map.

At one point, I was going to stop rendering, but then I thought that if I
went this far, I might as well finish it now.

I'm never rendering a diamond again.  :)

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