I appended a sample animated humanoid into an existing scene in Blender v2.4.1. (Thanks to Andrew Kator for providing the humanoid model!) I’m able to do everything I want with it except for rendering it. The frame counter (mouse pointer) counts upwards forever with only a black screen in the render preview. I’ve found that if I disable radiosity during the render, everything works as desired. The problem is, both the imported model and another object in my scene need radiosity.
set max iterations in the radiosity buttons to 500 or so [to start]
increasing the polygon count in your scene will SIGNIFICANTLY increase the number of iterations it takes to reach the convergence level. I like to use the max iterations… but it takes a fair amount of tweaking
One day I’ll ask why the iteration slider “only” goes to 10,000 but when if you leave it @ 0 and have lots of occlusion and translucent/transparent things, it can go well over 300,000… (as in, time how long 10,000 takes, and multiply that by the time you slept overnight… to wake up and find it still solving.)
Ah, that sucks. Reflective / transmissive surface properties definitely affect global illumination, so says the additional brightness and brown tint to the light from the indirect sunlight reflecting off my ceiling hitting my coffee table and reflecting this additional light back onto the ceiling and walls and around the room… I guess we’re just not there yet. WE NEED MORE POWER!
Then it’s just the scene complexity? I wonder how long it would run if I didn’t stop it, on a 1.5G scene of 10M faces across 250+ objects? A month?
Scratch that. No I don’t. But thanks, good to know re: reflectivity and absorption though. (Besides that’s hypothetical, I would split that scene up bigtime if there were any way possible.)