I've been working on this for a little while dealing with caustics, weird marks on the render, and image noise. But I've now gotten my second draft out. It looks okay to me, but it seems like I could make it better in more than one way, so any suggestions or criticisms are welcome.

It was rendered with Micropolygon Rendering instead of Ray Tracing due to render time, it took 11 hours as it is. One area light for ray traced shadows, and a spot light for caustics. I'm using a VEX GI shader in SHOP for the caustics in Micropolygon. Photon count of 600,000 and caustic count of 600; no GI photons.



http://flickr.com/photos/heydabop/2912048362/ [flickr.com]

What size are you rendering at? I wouldn't have expected something rendered at that size to take 11 hours.

That's a thumbnail, it was 1280x800. I didn't think it would take that long, but the caustics really slowed it down. It was rendered on a AMD Turion 64 X2 at 2.18 GHz, running with 32-bit instructions, not 64. Bucket size of 128.

Also, for about 3 hours total mantra didn't have all of my processor to itself, but still more than 85%. Here's the full size render.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3177/2912048362_5aff52b6ab_o.png [farm4.static.flickr.com]

it's really pretty….but 11 hours does seem very long…

Thank you.

It's long, but I've learned to put up with it, and I usually just let it do most of the rendering while I'm asleep.