Have any breathtaking indirect lighting renders done in under 8 minutes?

Depends who's breathing.
Breathtaking renders and Poser don't really go hand in hand.
Most will have tons of postwork to camoflage the Poser faults.
Show us yours !

somebody will do one, but it will take longer than 8 minutes.
my suggestion would be a contest sponsored by SM, and the prize would be $500 for the most breath-taking poser render.

Cough,  cough,  oh dear My emphysema is acting up again..

SM and Adobe should team up..   $500 from SM and Photoshop from Adobe..!!

Another who think the make art button exist

But Anthanasius the Make Art button does exist, just ask PhilC for confirmation. ;)

Quote - Another who think the make art button exist

But it does exist...    It is button #8 on My seven button Mouse..

Breathtaking renders usually need more than 8 minutes, even with mental ray and Photorealistic Renderman.

... and the "Make Art"-button comes with Wardrobe Wizard.

Setting an arbitrary time like "under 8 minutes" is pointless and silly for ANY 3D render program.
and using a highly subjective term like "breathtaking"
is Equally Meaningless.

Yeah, and then find out that it was Posette that won! 
That would put some red cheeks on some..... :-)

Anyway - I'd call this "interesting". Rendered under 4 minutes with IDL. Some of the areas visible had not direct light at all.

You truly are the king of kings.

Be careful, TZORG, or BB will be able to get 'breathtaking' in that render in under 8 minutes

I seem to be the only entrant. What do I win? snicker

Quote - I seem to be the only entrant. What do I win? snicker

Our admiration and gratitude.  Oh yeah, and my Batman suit when I finish it. :biggrin:

it would actually be very easy to judge the most breath-taking render.
just fill up the SM conf room with all the free personnel and run a slide show.
the one that registers highest on the gasp-o-meter would be the winner - good, bad or ugly.
it's a totally transparent process :lol:

Using only a single spot light. The P8 backdrop prop, and my environment sphere provided secondary lighting.

Click for full size.

Strange hairs ! ;-)

The hair is set to be invisible to raytracing (good luck rendering layers of transparency with GI in small time).

Quote - The hair is set to be invisible to raytracing (good luck rendering layers of transparency with GI in small time).

Hmmm. I got distracted today while I was setting this up. I may have not re-enabled that. I'm timing the render again.

So now it is 9 minutes 30 seconds. Whoops. I could get back under 8 if I cheat the render settings a little more. Or just make it a bit smaller.

You can get these faster renders by decreasing the IDL samples and cache settings. Try Samples = 150, and Cache = 20, and just 2 bounces.

This one was Samples=30, IC=15. This is too low for most uses but it does illustrate how to get speedy test renders.

On my spot light, I had shadow blur radius = 3, and shadow samples = 10.

@BB ;-)
Shaking head, not fair, blowing the competition into no man's land before they even started. :-)
Drip-drip-drip, walking off, bouncing into wall. Oeps, that hurt.

BTW, nice set up on the model, and even the clothing renders very detailed (on the high versions)
 Just the legs look a bit "dull, evened out", do not find the exact word.
From this side of the globe, i'd add a little spec or highlight, or a slight bump noice or gravel.
Bump, Not displacement, as that would add to the render time.
(my 2 cents)

Or? ? ?
You could "sharpen" the skin texture, add a little contrast, and plug the same skin into diffuse, spec, highlight, and bump. (would not add to texture memory load, as it is the same skin).
(that was the 3d cent)  ;-)

8 minutes of IDL on an 8year old P4 system...lol.... it can just about dribble

i still used P4 till last year.
now, I stil use P5 from time to time.
had a double installation P7 and P8 (one never knows) but ended up deleting P7/

Nice to know that you can push the IDL settings that low and still get a decent test render in a far more manageable amount of time.  I figured I had to be doing something wrong that even my quick test IDL renders were taking an hour or two.

This image of Stonemason's "Walled City" was rendered in eleven minutes on my old computer (old dual core). On my new one, it took less then five minutes. IDL, one light and an env sphere. Not breathtaking, but a proove that IDL can be very fast with the right settings.

Sure without reflect/refract a render can be really speed :-)

Yes, on my Dell D830.

And then, no one set the conditions for the 8-minute render except for breathtaking. 

the other conditions:

• nice hair
• well-fitting clothes
• pleasing pose and facial expression
• room full of props
• background props

without all of those there's no way it could be breath-taking IMVHO.  it would just be another bald nude zombie in empty scene.

 Bagginsbill - her skirt is immodestly short don't you think?

IMHO the bald nude zombie will be breathtaking if photorealistic...

My knees get weak mostly at photorealistic interior renders with no human figures to sabotage them

Quote - the other conditions: - nice hair

• well-fitting clothes
• pleasing pose and facial expression
• room full of props
• background props

without all of those there's no way it could be breath-taking IMVHO.  it would just be another bald nude zombie in empty scene.

?

Who write this ?

Quote -  Bagginsbill - her skirt is immodestly short don't you think?

I thought I was being conservative by not posting a nude again. ;-)

Anyway - I chose the outfit to cover naughty bits but still show a lot of skin.

¡ c'est moi !

7 minutes 58 seconds.

Click for full size.

One infinite light.

Dang, people sure have a very low threshold for having their breath taken away (no slam against BB's lighting).

BB in that last pic the reflection map has a big problem, the sandy beachfront is way out of scale.  It's also drawn at oddly different hights on the two large reflecting buildings in the right half, I don't know what's up there (maybe the UVmap but I'd have thought mapped reflections wouldn't much care about the UVmap).

And as for the scale of the beach, I think you're misinterpreting the scale of what you're seeing. It's not a little beach.

This is the view from the rooftop of the building in the lower right, with the sloped wall.

This panorama was taken from a kite flying almost two hundred feet above the ground.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldo/2626866515/

What really bugs me about that reflection from earlier is that the horizon is right up to the middle of most of the buildings.  Either the camera is angled down (x orbit) kind of a lot - and it doesn't appear to be - or the horizon is way too high in most of the reflections.  From the perspective, it looks to me like the camera is perfectly perpendicular to the ground (x orbit again) but I may be mistaken.  The later pics are a lot more convincing, probably because a little more natural-looking camera angle.

Could it be that in the first pic, the buildings are in a pit?

When glass on a building (or any mirror) is perfectly perpendicular to the ground, the perspective of horiizon reflections is the same as if the building wasn't there and you were looking at the horizon directly. A little bit of trigonometry verifies this, if you're of a mind.

So - with the camera floating a couple hundred feet off the ground, as in my first render, the horizon passes through the middle of the buildings. Maybe this is an unfamiliar viewpoint, but it is pretty much correct. There is some small amount of distortion due to the fact that the environment sphere is only 750 feet across, not 40 miles, but this only shifts the results a few degrees.

Anyway - the point I was making was you can do an 8 minute IDL render and have it come out pretty nice. The particular reflections of scenery aren't the point - the point is that the lighting from sky and ground is very well taken into account with no fussing, guessing, and test rendering using IBL + AO. I didn't do anything to tweak the lighting - with IDL it is completely automatic.

I am impressed!

Real photo, not a render, showing where the horizon appears on buildings from a helicopter viewpoint.

Observe that the directly viewed horizon is even with the reflected horizon, and both are at an apparent elevation matching the camera elevation.

Tilting the camera up or down doesn't change this. The horizon appears on a building at the same elevation as the camera is, regardless of the cameras orientation. If you can see the building, the horizon will be reflected there.

Angles of reflections are only affected by the cameras position, not its orientation. That's why they don't jump around when you turn the camera to a different place.

And how long did it take to render this one?  Heh, heh.