Bill Pragnell wrote:
> > 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....

Well, here is another test render. This time it only took 6 and a half hours,
but I rendered at a lower resolution and with less antialiasing. I am using my
everyday PC but it has 2 cpu cores so it doesn't have too much of a detrimental
effect on the other things I am doing. Plus if I leave it going overnight I
don't seem to notice at all...


> 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!

This render uses no radiosity. I also toned down the phong highlight a bit,
although maybe I didn't need to. The reflection on the ground has not been
changed but now I am using an HDR background so the effect is more pronounced.

I used TGQ's light dome method that I mentioned in an earlier post, to generate
the lights from an image. It is not too slow for parse-time with only 32
lights. If you're interested his post was on 14 May 2007 in p.b.s-f:
http://news.povray.org/povray.binaries.scene-files/thread/%3Cweb.46488bca4e05d400c150d4c10@news.povray.org%3E/

The probe I used was The Kitchen by JVP (available at ignorancia.org). The glass
texture is based off an IRTC entry by Tek in 2005. Many thanks to all you
amazing people!


I still have a few more tweaks before I re-do the final render.


-sooperFoX

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