Hi
I experimented with the AAO and indirect lighting and found good results mainly come with well meshed models which however on a laptop seems to slow down the rendering a lot because the calculation of the occlusion is quite intensive when you render.
Do you locally just mesh the model finer where you want more color bleeding and light bounces or do you skip it at all?
Just curious how you use it.
For my little experience I can confirm exactly what you wrote, Claas.
Increasing subdivision of the models improves indirect lighting quality, and yes, I try to use it in first place to learn how achieve good results before relying on external render engines, that usually require changes on materials, lighting and obviously more time.
I use it a lot… I haven’t done any specific modelling for it, just use subsurf…
My scenes probably aren’t optimal in general case… years of games modelling has led to “teapot in the stadium” situations… but that is probably why I’m having good results with indirect light: The “focus” of the shot has plenty of polys and more “background” stuff has less…
At least the raytrace optimisation in 2.5 means that this isn’t as bad as it used to be!
I’ve found indirect it might double the render time, but it’s still acceptably fast! very quick actually.
I’ve found that a lot of scenes are better without AO and just using indirect and environment lights… I still get that “accessibility” feel, but can put lights in nooks and crannies that just wouldn’t cut through the AO
Just out of curiosity I made a small test between IL and Cycles and besides better color bleeding and more bounces of course Blender IL got quite close sometimes. I can see this being quite useful for animations where you cannot observe a still image for lighting flaws.
if you like blender renderer then use this. but if you want to try something different i would sugest yafaray.
It can be really useful at Times, very useful indeed. Although not suitable on laptops (as was said before) on a desktop computer it works nicely (i7 helps…a lot) and the results are quite nice indeed. Of course, cycles (or any other path tracer for that metter) is of course a path tracer, and is completely designed for well…this. Better results come from brute force, apparently.
But not needing to set up Nodes/huge lighting setups/render settings is always a plus.
I’ve found indirect it might double the render time, but it’s still acceptably fast! very quick actually.
Not using displacement maps though. Pre-calulations may never end LOL.
Quite different using cycles. Some less than a min pre-calculations and much faster then.
@cekuhnen, I’ll never use BI again, I mean, I have to. IL is close sometimes, OK. Just noticed that when compressing a rendered image (jpg) cycles needs 50% more compression for the same BI scene. Much more information and lighting dynamics, it seems so. Its visible. Its not something to do with noise, I checked this. It happens using other decent renderers.
I was going to mention that thread Ricky!
Lighting a scene compeltely with IL can get tricky when you want some more exact stuff, but in general lamps are fairly un realistic (except when simulating sky and ambient light, but that is obvious)
Much faster now than before. (rendered the same scene, 2.49b v 2.57b, about twice the speed)
Animation is the main point here… I’m working on a short in my spare time and am getting great results @ under a minute a frame… that’ll change as I get closer to final, but cycles takes 20+ minutes a frame on the same scene (to get the same smoothness) I know it’ll improve as it’s just a sketch of a renderer at the moment… but I’ll be using BI for quite some time…
Shame as Cycles is so easy to get good results with! I really need a sunlight though!
edit:
for stills Cycles is already a great choice!
really need a sunlight though!
+1
Not a point light instead.
To bad that the Sintel Scenes are only for purchase.
I would like to see how they used IL there for the shots with the alley inside the city.
They’re CC licensed I beleieve… there are some torrents which are legal with that license…(I never bothered downloading)
It’s not that pricey to buy the dvd and it supports blender development!
I can make much better result with the old radiosity. Maybe there is something I dont understand in the indirect lighting… 
I did not look into the torrect idea ops.