Hackberry Hollow

My intention on Tuesday was to include three renders of the cabin, but due to rendering time constraints (combined with the late start) I was only able to post two. Here is the third image.

Indoor lighting setups are far more complex than outdoor setups. All the reflected light has to be faked, for example, and more of the props in the scene are in frame. (such the individually-modeled books in this case) The image above took thirty hours to render in Blender 2.49. Supposedly Blender 2.5 has had some render optomizations, so last night, I decided to compile the latest Blender 2.5 build from svn to see how the render time would compare. Instead of leaving it overnight and relying on the program’s own feedback to determine what the time was, I was shocked to watch the image come to life in minutes as though no one ever told it that it should be slow.

When comparing render times with other recent scenes, I found that 2.5 is able to render consistently at approximately 60-80 times the speed of the stable 2.4x branch with identical results on my 8-core Xeon system. Even though 2.5 is not considered stable, or “safe” for production use, we almost can’t afford not to use it at least for rendering. So hats off to the Blender development team!