Dabbling with reflection

[BMattster]

These are a few AWESOME tests with reflection.

       This is what I did on this project (please excuse the nerdy talk) :
     
      First, I made, copied, and pasted a bunch of rectangles (somewhere in the vicinity of 200)
     Then, I modeled a huge box and placed it over the smaller rectangles.
     After that, I grouped all of the objects into one object and made a material.
     I put the specular of that material on 1 and made the reflection attribute.
     Then...... BINGO!!!!!! I placed my objects into a scene. That is it.
   Enjoy!

(PS. I want to make an animation with the objects in the pictures, but that would take WAY too long to render it (possibly weeks or a month!). Any suggestions on how to cut down rendering time would be awesome.)

[BMattster]

These are some before and after pictures.

The before was rendered with the scanline renderer.
The after was rendered with the ART ray tracer.

[dwsel]

I hope it's not too late for the answer:

I see a lot of noise in your images. Are they created by Ambient Occlusion, glossy reflections or soft shadows? To speed up the animation you might want to turn off AO, and use sharp shadows and sharp reflections wherever you can. When not possible - one can use lowest sampling rates for soft shadows that does not look grainy (to avoid flickering) - the same goes for AA samples. If you don't need very deep 'tunnel of mirrors' then RayDepth scene attribute set to 3-4 if there are only reflections or 6-7 when there are some refractions will speed up rendering a lot.

As for rendering itself - I can suggest rendering separate frames to *.bmp, at night, using all cores you have/all cores on all computers around It can be done using several instances of Anim8tor, each having the same scene loaded, but with different range of frames assigned for rendering.

[Maximilianibus]

hey, , dwsel, good idea!