"sooperFoX" <bon### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Thanks Bill, that is a very amazing shape.

I'm glad you found it inspirational. I can't take the credit for formulating it
however; I found the equation on the net somewhere.

> But it took about 2 and a half days to render in 2 threads on a
> dual-core 2.4ghz PC so I won't be reattempting this until

Ah, that's not too bad. I've run some large images for a couple of weeks in the
past, sometimes as test renders! Of course, this is slightly inconvenient if
you're using your everyday machine....

With regards to what Alain said about radiosity and photons - I've found that
when using very high quality radiosity with glass objects, you can get caustics
naturally without photons. However, they're not nearly as good as photon-mapped
caustics. If you use the simple scene you posted before then I wouldn't bother
with radiosity, it probably won't add much (although it will clobber your
render time). But the light-dome method, or even just an area_light, would
probably look pretty good!

I tried to make a mesh version of the knot-blob by tracing rays out from its
centre, but sadly it occludes itself in places so it didn't work well enough.
I'll make a mesh version of a non-blobbed knot at some point - this should
render a bit quicker.

Bill

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