"posfan12" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> I've attached a subset of a scene I'm working on.

Cool scene, posfan.

> Any tips on improving the render? I added focal blur at one point in time, but
> that slowed the render by a factor of 10 I think.

1) Subsurface scattering. (Important if rendering closeups.)
2) Dramatic lighting, provided by a table lamp or sunlight set off to one side,
and a moody sky/environment.
3) Radiosity with a low error_bound and a highish count.
4) Blurred reflections.
5) A night render, with fade_power 2 area lights in the street lamps and house
windows.

Any one of those suggestions is going to increase the rendering time,
unfortunately. Hate to suggest it around here, but using Blender + Cycles is
better for rendering Legos, as many of the rendering features necessary for
rendering plastics come cheaply.

Check out these two images I rendered using Blender + Cycles:

http://i447.photobucket.com/albums/qq199/stbenge/misc%20renders/LegoSet18m_48s.jpg
http://i447.photobucket.com/albums/qq199/stbenge/misc%20renders/LegoSet8m_42s.jpg

The rendering times are included in the image names. (hardware used: CPU, 4 x
2.4 GHZ)

I think Mr. Lipka has been working on modifications that will eventually make
combining radiosity, SSS and focal blur more efficient (if I'm not
misunderstanding his goals). My hope is that someday soon POV-Ray will rival
Cycles in terms of render speed (not taking into account GPU-accelerated
rendering, which is always severely limited by VRAM).

Sam

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