I'd just, for the first time, started playing with some polygonal models 
available on the internet, and I saw a great rendering on the Sunflow 
gallery page of a 3D scanned stone bust: 
http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/gallery/v0072/statue_ajax-jpeg.jpg
(from the gallery http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/index.php?pg=gall on 
Sunflows sourceforge page)

The model itself has about 540,000 polygons, and is available via 
http://forum.jotero.com/viewtopic.php?t=3&sid=b917ccdcb01d6651ec313e5192f9faf2

Since I'd not used high poly count models, or focal blur much, I though 
I'd just try to re-render the Sunflow picture using POVRay.

The test renders took about an hour or so, but for the final render I 
pumped up the settings and went to bed - I probably set them too high, 
as the render time was 10 hours 57 minutes in the end.

The focal blur was set to 100 samples, radiosity to 5 bounces, 
error_bound to 0.5, and the count to 900.

I converted the model using using Cross Roads 3D - which gave me a 142M 
POV source file. Are there any other utilities that can convert other 3D 
formats to POVRay? Something that supported mesh2 might be nice for example.

The model is lit from a single point light source, but the radiosity 
does a great job of making that look pretty realistic. The original 
Sunflow picture's author did a great job of posing and lighting the bust 
  - there's some real flair in that.

It's interesting to see the differences between the POVRay and Sunfow 
renders - I suspect that the Sunflow render was using less bounces.

I converted the HDR output to JPG in Photoshop, and adjusted the 
contrast and saturation to make it a closer match to the Sunflow one so 
I could compare them side to side.

Cheers,
Edouard.

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