Quote - bagginsbill you didnt work on the GI right? do you think it is a smart GI that gets you good results with speed or is it just a  simple ''monte carlo'' GI that will take a lot of time to render for simple scenes.

how would this GI work with transmapped hair. would this take ''1 month'' ? or how does this GI work with reflections and transparent objects? 

in your opinion do you think that they just threw inside a GI or did they spend to make a god GI?

I didn't work on the GI at all. I don't know too many details, but I'm certain it is not a naive Monte Carlo implementation. I don't know what the optimizations are, but I know there is something sophisticated in it. You can see watch it as it calculates the indirect lighting. It puts red dots in to show where it is calculating and where it isn't. It does a very good job of skipping hundreds of pixels in each bucket where extra rays are just not needed.

Reflections don't seem to upset render times much. But transparency in general, and transmapped hair in particular still slow things down a lot. How much, I don't know, as I have not had the patience to watch one. I will try an overnight render with hair tonight. I did a large version of the Alyson render last night. It was 1800x1400 pixels and finished in just under 4 hours. The good news is unlike the introduction of AO a couple years ago, it produced exactly what I expected with no artifacts, so I don't have to do it again. I can move on to the next image.

I have had only limited experience with other renderers so I can't really make any informed comparisons. I tried various GI algorithms with Kerkythea, but they were all very simple box-and-a-ball type renders. When I loaded a V4 with hair into Kerky, I did not get a nice image without GI, so I never tried with GI. Unfortunately, learning how to operate any other renderer correctly is time consuming for me, and I'm probably not going to get around to that.

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)