Hi,
I noticed this is mentioned in the Blender 2.5 development thread, but I think this quite a big thing so I wanted to make a thread about it.
Here’s what Farsthary has doing! 
Finally! Looks reasonably fast so far. I hope he has a lot of time to dedicate to it after his graduation. Although I’m not sure how he has any freetime during crunch time.
It seems everyone in the Blender community is counting on Jaguarandi and his raytrace optimization project. Let’s hope it will make a significant difference.
This is great news!!! A special congratulations to farsthary and seriously, i cant just stop thanking him. I just wish Jaguarandi’s project works out better than expected.
He put some screens up?..not completely horrible render times either…not good(speed), but coming from no FG to any type of FG solution…what can I say.
probably the code is not optimized as well.
I am very curious where this is going to. It looks seriously promising.
Well he’s finding free-time somehow if he’s posting this, after he graduates he won’t have the convienence of internet at his university anymore, I hope he can still access the internet in some sense after he graduates.
When he graduates, he will hopefully be employed by the Blender Foundation and be responsible for R&D in Blender.
That is a very cool idea.
Or be contracted by a professional animation company to develop Blender for their rendering needs.
He could end up like Ben2610 who is getting paid to develop Blender for a professional studio, it would be cool if he got paid to develop Blender.
Though I do agree it would be neat to see Farsthary join the Blender Institute and work alongside Brecht and Ton.
This would be definitely one of the best things that could ever happen to Blender! Vote Farsthary for Blender Foundation coder ;)!!! (I am totally serious about this!)
great news for blender internal… fartshary keep it coming 
This would be definitely one of the best things that could ever happen to Blender! Vote Farsthary for Blender Foundation coder ;)!!! (I am totally serious about this!)
as if it’d matter, lol, but definitely has my vote…!
edit: and this final gathering for bi sounds extremely interesting…
Although I am sure he is a far better coder(bug squash-er) than I am and he IS on a roll it seems, the proof is in the pudding…besides we are having a “fan boy” discussion here…not that I disagree, quite the opposite. I just think there are far more things to take into consideration. Who knows though maybe Ton and company will take a more serious look at new personnel. What does Farsthary want?
oh yeah… FG kekass!
It’d be a hell of a commute!
Being able to help his family while supporting Blender and the whole community would be a dream come true for him. He is a passionate guy that just wants to help everyone. His whole family are some of the most beautiful, generous and artistically talented people you could meet. Seriously. Every single one of them is a brilliant artist in a very different area, and they are all incredibly generous under constraints we could barely imagine without experiencing them.
so what are we waiting to bring him at blender’s institute ?
I actually agree with him being a full time Blender coder…I’m just weighing things out…giving other perspectives.
If his problem seems to be high frequency noise, shouldn’t he be able to fix that with something similar to what is used for AAO?
Hi all !
Thanks for your encouraging thoughts about me , yes, I hope some day in the future be able to work in R&D at full time for Blender and Blender community, and what better place than in Blender Capital ?
But for that to happen lot of conditions have to be met so currently this is only a dream and meanwhile I need to focus on my current project and increase my knowledge and experience in Blender, I just being toying around for near two years.
About the Final gathering, it is currently awfully unoptimized, the photon map phase is not threaded and also lack some features that when I get more time I will try to add to it.
Anyway is still interesting as a guide for a complete implementation in the future.
The render internal of Blender is very powerful and capable but sadly is slow, making any algorithm constructed on top of it plainly slow also, but that hopefully could change if ray tracing get boosted 
So, I will polish the Final gathering build and I will release it by coming weeks, stay tuned :rolleyes:
Cheers to all Farsthary