Okay, here are the settings for the cloth as glossy and as matt translucent

More clicky clicky

Cheers Paolo!

Quote - You actually do :) All materials like Glossy and Metal are shaders.

Really? D'oh! :D

Quote -
In the RW you often need more light behind an object than is shining on it.  I have found it is often the same in 3D. Do you have a stronger light source behind the curtain?

 

On the matt-transparancy I have found a little goes a long way - 5-15% will probably do you.'

 

Another (more difficult) option would be to make a transparancy map like you do for lace or fishnets with a tight weave

No idea how to make transparency map, so I'll plump for the soft option and turn the matt-transparency setting to something lower. I do have a stronger lightsource behind the curtain. The backdrop is a mesh light, though it's only marginally stronger than the curved mesh I have shining on the figure - the plane mesh is at 8.0000000 while the curved mesh is at 6.5000000.

Quote - Add a shader and lower the opacity?

Never used shaders in Reality either, but I could look into it. Thanks for the suggestions.

Help appreciated on this one guys and gals :)

Clicky clicky

I'd like to have a slight translucency to the sheet behind her, but there are no mats with the prop, and if I set it to matt translucent it becomes tooo translucent (and very noisy).

Any suggestions? I've never used matt translucent, or the transluceny setting for glossy materials either, so I've no clue what to do for the best.

Quote - That made me smile.. from here on out.. my wife's will be called wally jumblats and she'll wonder where the hell it came from until she catches up on forum posts.

Nice! But I must credit Adrian Edmondson with the term. I read it in one of his books when I was thirteen and had tears streaming down my face I laughed so much.

Thanks for the comment, Michael. Greatly appreciated :)

I tend to prefer using mesh lights because they really kick the realism up a notch, IMHO. There were two curved mesh lights by the right of the shrine, and the backdrop is a plane converted to light. I don't normally use backdrops because they can dictate the lighting, but I figured I should try and get used to using them.

@Reggie68 - That's a nice image, and I like the use of FOV to give a sense of movement. Not sure that any of the female athletes have a pair of wally jumblats quite that big though :)

Quote - Poor Helen.. did you actually read that?

I started to read it, but then my eyes went squiffy and my head started to hurt sniff

I've rendered a hyper-realistic glass skull before now, and it made the s/p take a hit. Totally worth it though!

Here goes nothing :)

The lighting isn't right, but there was no way I could match the lighting in the backdrop and have her well lit. So science got told to take a hike for art's sake. Shadows aren't strong enough either, because I used mesh lights instead of spots or points. Lots to learn yet about Reality, which is why I'm here I guess, lol.

Aaaaargh, charts! My head hurts! :P

Quote - Some effective tips: hide what you don't see. If you can't see a material zone in the vieport, then set it to Null in Reality. There is no point in rendering the invisible engine of a car in the scene if it is not visible. Keep lights to a minimum. Glossiness is prob one of the biggest culprits; try not to use max values. The higher the gloss value, the longer the render takes.

Thanks for the tips, Doc! It would be nice to know why I got a decrease in s/p instead of an increase with the RC3, but I'll just chalk it up to my luck and move on :)

Nice render, btw.

@superboomturbo - No chance of adding more cpu's, the best I can hope for in that area is to overclock my AMD 1090T to 4.0 Ghz when I get it in my new rig, whenever I finally get that built. Thanks for the additional tips though.

@Abi - I thought the set of prints are someone staring through the window.

Lol, no I'm not on a Mac. I use a program called Windowblinds that changes the UI in Windows.

Yeah, I didn't let it render for too long, but I've never noticed things get better the further on in a render I get, so I figured letting it get to the same s/p with each version of Lux would illustrate the problem.

Is there any way to increase the s/p, beyond lowering the image size? I've already changed the display interval to 300 from 20 and that doesn't make any difference, nor does changing the write interval.

I'm assuming this is the data line

http://img51.imageshack.us/img51/7672/luxrender.jpg

Quote - I noticed a significant increase in speed. This room used to take me 5 to 6 hours now takes 2 to 3. Overall it still takes me longer to produce LUX renders but with the availability of queue rendering I dont mond so much.

That's odd, because I seem to be getting a decrease in performance. The scene I finished rendering earlier tonight was getting 3 samples per pixel every second with version 0.9, but with the RC3 version it gets 2 samples every second, which would massively increase the final render time when rendering to 2500.

Nice and simple, just the way I like it :)

Cheers Paolo