Quote - The grain of the image has a photographic look, it does not look like the usual GC noise. It might work very well as it is (make the whole thing black and white and then sepia/bluish silver color it and you have a 40's or 50's photograph) or it might be manageable with programs like NeatImage. About rendering: a mad proposal for geekiest among us. Lux is available also on Linux and does not require a graphical UI. I have seen reports of people making personal supercomputers out of clusters of cut-to-the-bone motherboards with Linux installed with price tags less than 2500$...

Another alternative, when Lux will have a good support for CUDA, is the option of making a dedicated PC with 3/4 nVidia graphic cards with high-end processors; it is not a demented proposal, I have described nothing more than a high-end gaming box.

Good points, Alex. My old box was dual-boot XP-Pro/Ubuntu 10.04 so using that slick OS is a consideration, absolutely.I'm a happy user of Ubuntu, and staunch supporter.

Also, I forgot to mention the one thing that is reasonably good about my system: NVidia 460-series card that supports OpenCL. No idea how to get all that working, though. Is there somewhere one can flip a switch or download a driver to make it work in Lux? Or is that technology still a bit rough around the edges and needs a bit of refinement before it will behave predictably?

Monterey/Mint21.x/Win10 - Blender3.x - PP11.3(cm) - Musescore3.6.2

Wir sind gewohnt, daß die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen
[it is clear that humans have contempt for that which they do not understand] 

Metaphor of Chooks