Here's my continuing saga with the Great Room setup - I'm very nearly at a point wher eI might slip a figure in and render it off as a finished image (how exciting, eh?)

I switched from point lights to spots, and set them to a 180 degree angle. When I did this, I noticed something that's worth keeping in mind for other users of this script - you need to set both angle start AND angle end to the same setting - don't keep angle start at the '0' level. If you do this, then the lights don't work properly. I would imagine this is because the light material now controls all the falloff, so combining the linear fallof of angle start/end with the inverse square falloff of the material causes curious things to happen... on the other hand, that might not be it at all: I'm sure Baggins can exaplin this better than I.

Removing the point lights meant that the ceiling was no longer lit at all which was unrealistic - in the real world, due to GI, the ceiling is lit indirectly by the light bouncing off all the other surfaces. To compensate for this, I disabled the floor's "cast shadows" option, and set an infinite light pointing straight up at 50% intensity to act as a bounce light. I turned the bounce light's shadow setting down to 0.3, and its shadow blur radius to 20 (the highest you can get on raytraced shadows). Without any furniture in the room, this is what you get:

I like this, but at the moment, the ceiling looks incredibly flat. So I added in some furniture, and increased the render settings (minimum shading rate down to 0.5, and bucket size down to 32). The following render took about 6 hours to complete (I am SO upgrading in the next month or so - only on an AMD Sempron 2300+ with 512 RAM at the mo):

Looking at this, I'm inclined to think that perhaps the ceiling is a little bright - in the next render, I might bring the intensity of the bounce light down to maybe 30-35%, instad of 50. I like the soft shadows projected up there from the furntiure, though, especially the subtleties captured in the dome (which looked horribly flat in the previous render). OH, yes... the only other material I dickered around with on this was the glass setting - I used BagginsBill's fresnel glass shader on the windows and door glass, in order to give the reflections in the glass and the ground/skydome outside. Other than that, all the materials are as they were in the original Great Room package, and I'm really pleased how they've come out. I love the reflections in the poished wood floor, and the edge effect on the sofa works beautifully, too.

The next step for em here, I think, is to get the ceiling looking right. For the moment, I think I'm going to forgo the GI script, although I have dutifully copied it and saved it away in my runtime for later use - I just don't thnk my computer has enough power in it yet to pack that kind of punch. So it's just a matter of tinkering with the bounce light's settings until I'm completely happy with what comes up.

Any feedback on these images, including sugestions on where to work on them, would be much appreciated.

JonTheCelt