ziebelje

Thanks! I'll try those settings next and see what I get. I was using radiosity_final for a while but it wasn't all that great for me. Here's how things are looking: http://imgur.com/a/6uRbx. As long as the rest of the model looks good I think these settings should be good enough for my needs. :)

Wow I lowered it from 0.005 to 0.001. It's taking significantly longer to render but on a small portion the results look really good. I tried increasing error_bound last night. It helped but the overall realism in the shadows along corners dropped as well. Your approach works well. Do you mind sharing your entire radiosity setup? I'd like to give it a try and just see what it looks like.

I've been doing tons of refining to get some awesome renders with POV-Ray (LDD, LDD to POV-Ray) but I have one remaining issue. I'm currently using the Custom HQ Radiosity default from LDD to POV-Ray as this has given me the best-looking result. It's pretty slow but it does a really good job. What I'm encountering now are "artifacts" or something in some of the shadows. I'm going to continue trying to figure this out but if anyone has any suggestions I'm happy to hear them. The general gist of what I'm rendering is a white sky sphere, no base plane, and three area lights (one pointing down, two pointing at the front). Thanks! Here's the result: http://imgur.com/a/6mmxC Here are the settings: radiosity { pretrace_start 0.08 pretrace_end 0.005 count 1600 nearest_count 20 error_bound 0.02 recursion_limit 1 low_error_factor 0.25 gray_threshold 0 minimum_reuse 0.015 brightness 1.0 adc_bailout 0.01/2 normal on media off }

Thanks! I did actually see that. The only problem is that I would have to write a script to do that work since I want to render 300 frames and then combine them into a gif. I was hoping I had missed something obvious and that there would be some alternative without requiring all that effort. :)

Thanks, that helps!

I've just been using the different radiosity settings defined in LDD to POV-Ray. Those all spit out a bunch of custom settings so I don't think they're using any POV-Ray defaults. I can try to see if I can figure that out. Side-note: I see that you wrote your own LEGO CAD program. I only have experience with LDD but given the lack of official support do you have any recommendations? I understand you'll be a bit biased but I also expect you know better than anyone what's out there. I enjoy building LEGO in a CAD application somewhat, but I mostly enjoy the satisfaction of photo-realistic renders.

Changing some of the settings like max_trace_level helped but at the point when it got fast enough the quality was too low. I think I am already doing what you're suggesting for the 300 frames, although maybe there are other optimizations I can make? In order to do my render, I'm using LDD to POV-Ray to export the geometry. Then I edit the INI file to include a clock and the POV file to move the camera around the object. POV-Ray then exports each frame as it's own file. The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do is rotate the actual geometry...it's all sort of encapsulated so the only way I could figure out how to get rotation was to move the camera around. Besides that, are there any other optimizations I can make that would "cache" render data between frames? I don't know enough about the math behind this to have any educated guess here.

Yeah, the more I researched the more I came to that conclusion. I found some helpful tricks to speed up the rendering but my goal is to render a 300 frame rotation. No matter what shortcuts I use, the render is still going to take weeks at best. I'll just have to admit defeat on this one until I have time to explore some other options.

So I'm starting to play with rendering with POV-Ray. It's working really great, but I just tried to render a model with a transparent brick (87081 Brick 4x4 Round) and it took FOREVER. I can do things to help speed it up like turn off radiosity, crank the resolution down, etc but with those features off I can't get the effect I want. I'm comfortable editing the .pov file manually but I'm having a tough time figuring out what might help. Has anyone dealt with this before? I attached an example render (radiosity off, 960x540) to give you an idea. That render took 10 minutes. I can render the exact same model with the exact same settings with the transparent part replaced in 2 minutes. With the quality settings I want it takes hours to run and then just seems to get stuck on the transparent part. Thanks!