Here's an image I built to do a simple test of the new GI engine. 1.) It's a lot easier to set it so that you can get good results. 2.) The skylight controls are pretty spiff. The top image was rendered at 1280X1024 with the settings up pretty high (none all the way though). The render took five hours. The floor texture has an extreme bump in it and that challenged the render time significantly. The bottom image is a raytraced flavor with the ambient light turned up to get a similar kind of lighting level. It's clear how much better the GI image is. -Kix

Nice lighting, i think that architectural subjects are the better to make test with GI. Just a little curiosity, which computer you've used? I think that 5 hours of rendering are too much for this kind of image, because it seems to have basic textures and geometry. You have used also indirect light? -TOXE

I have used indirect light. The floor is a "carpet" I've tried to simulate with a challenging bump map. I re-rendered my pod racer last night and it took less than half the time. The geometry in that image is MUCH higher. I noticed my machine barely creeped along when it worked on the blue carpet for this image. Shadows came out great though! -Kix

I agree, it looks great....

Yeah, it's a big improvement. The ray-trace didn't allow the carpet blue to be picked up by the walls, nor did the ray-trace differentiate between the window-sill shadows and the interior shadows. They both got similar edge-diffraction effects, however.