About those photons: Perhaps try a different
autostop, like .25 or such. With autostop 0 it
may happen that it will stop shooting photons
as soon as it completes a full turn without
hitting the object. This happens nicely with a
torus blocking the light, but might also be
happening with the cigarette. Don't use arealight
for the photons, in my experience that made
things worse.
 About the smoke: try to model a blob and fill it
with scattering media. Best would be to make
two thick rims which spread out and turbulate,
and some connection between these two. These
two rims seem to be the main issue for realistic
cigarette smoke, at least to me.

Aside of that, nice job. The floor needs a realistic
texture, then you'd get a nice image.

Regards,
Tim

--
Tim Nikias v2.0
Homepage: http://www.digitaltwilight.de/no_lights
Email: Tim### [at] gmxde

> Study No 1 of a series of 1 so far :-)
>
> First image is an earlier render when everything was going well.
>
> I thought I had just a few things to sort out: add some
> smoke, use an area light to get rid of the particle shadows,
> use photons for the glass and fix up the max_gradient on the
> isosurfaces.
>
> As it turned out about half of what I did from then on made
> things significantly worse.  Look at the second image and
> you can see what I mean.
>
> --
> I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those pesky kids!

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