Well I spent about a half hour messing around with LW plus another 5 mins for rendering and got this
thats real cool! i LOVE the smooth glassy look!
oh my…another one of those “look at what MY renderer can do!” type of posts…it looks nice, but its VERY simple… :-?
Me likes it! Very nice-looking!
hmmm what can I say… good motivation for staying with Blender 
But, hey I don’t think that I can say that I could have made something like that in blender when i was new to it, even if I twice as much time… The refraction is nice, the caustics… suck.
WeWa
I don’t know why you thought I had caustics in that picture, because I had no caustics, but here is a render with caustics for ya.
Just curious. Alot of people are using Lightflow lately. Is there a demo available somewhere that I don’t know about? If not…what is the exact name of the .exe file? From what I have been seeing, this is most likely the product I will be purchasing.
There is no .exe. Lightflow is Free! Go to http://mysite.iptic.com/eeshlo/LFexportGUI_W.zip
for windows of http://mysite.iptic.com/eeshlo/LFexportGUI_L.tar.gz for Linux. Unzip the file and read the documentation. You will need to downoad python 2.0.1 from www.python.org. Install python, set the environment variables for Lightflow AND pythonpath (I forgot that one. Read the whole installing lightflow text) and then execute the script in Blender. That is mostly it. Cool? Good luck.
EDIT: Also you will need the lightflow .dlls from http://www.lightflowtech.com.
Sorry. I know what Lightflow is. Have not used it yet. What I am really looking for is LightWAVE. Went ftp hunting the other night for it…no show anywhere. If anyone knows of a demo anywhere…
I don’t think there is a demo, but if you go to www.lightwave3d.com there is a student discount if you are a student. Otherwise don’t get it. It’s too expensive.
Blendermax, when I’ll be able to do that kind of render, then I’ll agree it’s simple…You gotta cut us newbies some slack man…we spent many sleepless nights trying to get various raytracers to work, and now thanks to eeschlo(spelling?) our dream has come true. we’re just on our way up the 3D professional ladder, and we’re happy for every obstacle we can pass over. anyway, that was my opinion, as a newbie, you have yours, as a pro probably, we all live happily ever after.
about the actual render: lerpiedood, can you tell me a quick and dirty way to assign matspider materials to objects before I start reading the tutorials? nice render, but I think you should have enabled caustics in the first render. I’m guessing there’s just refractions and reflections there, right?