I made the above image hoping to learn more about lights in Indigo, because I dig the way these images with no outside light source look. It’s a tribe of primitive positronic pygmies dancing around an illuminated alter (ya, that’s an alter). I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t really matter.

All that matters is I learned not to mix high wattage light emitters with highly reflective materials, unless you have a massive amount of processing power or time. This image I let render for about 50 something hours while I was out hiking and enjoying the nice weather last week.

Holly took Friday and Monday off (probably for my birthday!) so we hung out a bunch, did some seek and find games on the internet, and cleaned the house. I decided to try rendering the same image again using a background light source since I knew I wouldn’t be doing any work on my machine for the next couple days.

This one rendered for about 43 hours before I stopped it so I could disassemble and clean my computer. I much prefer the darker version, but this one looks more “render-y” even though it rendered for less time.

I think this means the light reflections render faster when they aren’t the only source of light. Or, it means the speckling is less noticeable when there is other background light.

I also created an image of a giant robot feasting on some tiny Barrel of Monkeys type robots. This one rendered for about 20 something hours and looks pretty cool. I think I will turn it, along with the others, into desktop images. I don’t know what else I could do with them. I would have left this to render longer, but I needed to use my machine to get some actual work done. I want so badly to buy the full version of Indigo just so I could render at larger resolutions. Then I could fit more stuff in.

On a side note, I recently purchased a replacement PS3 for mine with a dead Blu-ray drive, so I’m looking forward to fiddling with the old one and seeing if I can use any of it’s power to render faster.