Hi all - I ended up with a little bit of time, so I thought I'd try combining
some of my techniques into a test render to see what sort of quality I could
get.

This is a high quality mesh of a Buddha (from Jotero.com I think) with one
(approx) 40x40x40 DF3 proximity pattern applied to three textures (bronze, stone
and steel).

The environment map is an HDR lightprobe I did of my old office (with a nice
balance of outside and inside lighting).

The lighting rig consists of 64 area lights generated by LighMapGen. I set the
"no_radiosity" flag on the environment map, and then turned on a very low
quality radiosity pass (20 samples) with a recursion limit of 1.

The scene was then rendered in multiple passes using animation and my Camera35mm
macros running in "stochastic rendering mode", which gives rise to the
anti-aliasing, focal blur and blurred reflections (on the stone).

Each pass of the 1280x720 scene took approx 2 minutes, and I let it run over
night, and in the morning combined about 300 passes into the final image.

Everything was rendered on my 2.26MHz MacBook Pro in the 64-bit bui;d of POV-Ray
3.7 b36.

I'll also post a comparison shot of very high quality radiosity on the same
scene, which gives almost identical lighting in it's 7 hour render, but without
anti-aliasing, focal blur or blurred reflections.

The main area I'm unhappy with is the focal blur - it's not as smooth as I would
like. I know another few hundred passes would fix that, but I think I've thought
up a great way to use the user_defined camera functions to end up with better
quality in about 1/4 the time. It's a shame I don't have them in POR-Ray 3.7!

Comments? Questions?

Cheers,
Edouard.

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