www.kraytracing.com

Neat. It is still flickering a bit, though. What were the render times like?

Use light mapping, but on the FG tab set the "paths" to 1. This means it actually does path tracing in corners and other areas that are problematic for light mapping. Works well.

I would typically recomend rendering it in a separate pass, along with some shadows and occlusion and whatnot for compositing. That's what I usually do.

http://newtek.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=54993&d=1203640430 Unless he's using old hardware, over three minutes for that is very unimpressive. It's better than Lightwave's ever managed to do before, yeah, but compared to Kray, or modo, or even mental ray? Not so much. Feh. Unless they...

I don't know if Kray supports color vertex maps, but you can use the Kray surface shader to tell it to use only light map for GI. With frame blending or shared GI, you get really fast render times and good quality.

Seems to work just fine. Kray renders whatever the viewport shows, so if your viewport shows displaced characters (be it MDD or otherwise), Kray should render it that way.

64-bit Vista runs fine on my machine.

-"photon mapping" as opposed to "light mapping" does not take into account backdrop/textured environment, etc. This is not a bug. Photon mapping simply does not work with backdrop illumination. -glass should never have any diffuse, using any value of diffuse slows rendering cons...

Basically, the shader would check the backdrop's color based on the incoming angle. I don't know if it would work with Kray's lumilights, but it's worth a go. Skyportals will work like that but no photons will be wasted as Ervin explained. As far as I can figure, sky portals work by guiding photons...

When I have time, I intend to create a "skyportal" shader, so to speak, for luminous polygons. Basically, the shader would check the backdrop's color based on the incoming angle. I don't know if it would work with Kray's lumilights, but it's worth a go.

What happens if you do a non-cached path trace render?

Do you mean you used FG with min 300 max 2000? It could be that the adaptive sampling for the final gather is failing due to the low light level. If you set it to min 2000 as well, maybe that'd help.

What does the precomputed irradiance look like?

Lightwave uses metric, internally. If you make a model four feet wide, for example, the actual data in the file is the equivalent in meters. Choosing a system basically just converts the display and input, it doesn't change the data itself.

What's with the noise over on the left?

Learn to love the metric system!