***Quote - Now that's a bit harsh, isn't it? Implying that Firefly is only good for speed and not for quality & realism, while it's clear Fireflu can do all of them just as well as Lux, only faster.***But I agree, a 2 minute LuxRender makes no sense.

I must be doing something wrong, do you guys not rely on fast draft previews to save time and judge for corrections? How do you guys do it? Remember speed is the highest priority for me and getting work done fast.

But don't get me wrong, when I go to sleep at night I let my machine render a scene for 3-6 hours.

Quote - This is dead on two minutes, it has to be exported but even including that this is five minutes tops.

That looks great for two minutes and if you divided the resolution by 50% you could get a fast dirty preview.

***Quote - Itmakes absolutely no sense to do a two-minite test in that way. For starters, what machine are we measuring? ***Second, that ti not the point of Lux. Lux is about wuality and realism. If speed is what you're looking for then Firefly with all the advanced options turned off is what you're looking for.

How much time do you spend on a render? I give myself a time limit. I try my hardest and work as fast as possible to finish a very high quality scene in 4-6 hours tops.  A fast draft preview helps me out a lot.  Maybe my workflow needs improvement.

Quote - Looking at Hornet's 2-minute render, one can at least see if the lights are in the right places...

Yes and if you divide his resolution in half it would render faster too :)

Quote - At two minutes, yes, you will be able to see if you need to change your lighting placement, though materials will take far more than 2 minutes to come clear enough to see if you need to adjust them unless they are horrifically out of whack.

That's fine. In firefly it's the same. When testing material I kick up that shading rate to like .2 and IC to 100 to see what the material truly looks like.

THOUGHTS

After reading every post in this thread I've come to the conclusion that if you take commissions, using reality 3 will force you to charge your client more since it takes longer to finish a render. However, the extra time isn't wasted since the quality output is significantly higher.

Am i wrong to think that in order to use reality 3 on a intermediate commercial level where speed is a concern, that I need two machines networked with i7 processors both hammering away at the luxrender?