@agentmilo: if you are careful in your scene preparation, my guess is that yes, you can. No caustics of some sort for now, though. Unless you fake them (plenty of ways to do that) you have to rely on an external renderer.
@pildanovak: you are right. Trying to address it at the moment. Will see if I can soften that
But not nearly as good as it could be done with yafaray or lux…
I wish blender could render realistic images as those do
This is the Blender alpha 2 Render branch, right?
FreeMind, BI is likely going to be refactored/rewritten to use a more modern shading pipeline in the near future, but it will probably never be an unbiased renderer like Lux. I don’t see the problem with using Lux when you are willing to accept high rendering times for physically-accurate lighting, and BI for circumstances where you’d rather have faster render-times, and can accept less-accurate lighting solutions…
The scene result in the new 2.5 GI is quiet good in terms of being not unbiased, but still we can’t say it gives the same results as the external non-unbiased like yafaray, vray, using advanced levels of rendering algorithms like photonmapping, bathtracing,…
but with some tweaks, the one can get good results with the recent BI non-mature GI, specially if you are making animations, … but that needs more efforts and time, though.
Although The BI 2.5 GI is still non-mature, but it’s very helpful especially for animations, and the one can get from the recent GI:
> fast rendering + quite realistic scenes= good looking short animation films.
But, still we are waiting for a more mature and complete BI GI, though.
It should be solved, now. The books needed a little more loopcuts: too much energy concentrated over too few vertices, it broke the luminosity equilibrium, I guess.
Here’s an update of the scene, just for the fun, as I don’t plan to go further than that for the moment!
