So we've been talking about large emitters and how that limits your options for tighter highlights and shadows.

I'm playing with SR3 and did an overnight render, which actually finished in 3 hours 10 minutes.

The block floating over the scene is not light-bulb size, but it is pretty small - about the size of one of the chests. It's ambient value is 60. I arrived at this number after directly photographing a light bulb and comparing its radiance (is that the right word?) to the objects it was illuminating. It required an exposure 60 times smaller to photograph the bulb into a similar photographed brightness as the other stuff in the room. (Which means that real-life diffuse value is around 1/60!!!)

Usually, something that small and hot would splotch the heck out of the render. But this was without IC.

There is some noise on the back-left wall - need more samples. I did this with 5000 samples. Probably need 20000 samples and take around 12 hours.

Seems we're getting into LuxRender territory.

---

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)