LUGNET Lego Ray-Tracing Challenge - September/October

55 Light Sources

Render Time ~12 hours (1024x780 0.3 aa q10)
Render Speed Average 25.2 PPS

This is another entry for Tim Gould's Disco Remix Challenge: http://news.lugnet.com/cad/ray/?n=2685 
 
The title 55 Disco was named so because there are 55 lights in this scene.  I know, I went a little crazy.  The scene took about 12 hours to render for 1024x768, aa 0.3, q10.
 
The .mpd file Tim provided has not been altered in any way.  I really wanted to have the light in the garbage can behind the bar show a transparent lego-stud on the wall, but no matter what I did it was backwards.  I could not figure out how to rotate it at that spot.  I really like Andreas' use of the meshenhancer and will definitely try that out next time for any "harsh" pieces. 
 
The spotlights aimed at the disco ball was where I originally started.  I couldn't get them to do what I wanted.  I tried photons.  I tried photons aimed at an invisible polyhedron.  I tried media.  Nothing worked.  Then when Andreas came out with his excellent use of the spot lights I decided to let that area go and work on the other areas I started. 
 
The bar shelf has three rows of lights.  The top row lights and the mid row lights are placed in the transparent object.  The bottom row lights are placed behind the objects.  All of the lights have a low fade distance and an exponential fade power to give the room a more glowy, darker effect.  I would have liked the top row drinks to show caustics on the walls, but I could not get photons to work due to the way the translator created a highly CSG'd model....in other words I kept getting a slab error - nothing to shoot photons at, and believe me when I tried everything including tearing apart the .pov and judicious use of "photons { collect off }."  Oh well, another time. 
 
The DJ light was actually an accident.  Originally I tried to place it so that the DJ was completely lit up and had a nice wall shadow, but what you see is what I started with, and I liked the weirdness of it.  I also liked the green it made. 
 
The floor is probably the best part of my entry.  It is the bulk of the lights (all are point lights with low fade distance and exponential fade power) for the scene.  There is a scattering media on the dance floor as well.  Originally, the lights were in the middle of each color block, but the media and lights created a horrible line artifact as the light was "escaping" through the cracks.  So, I had to change it to the pattern you see, but it turned out nicely.  The effect was complete when I put point lights in the DJ's speakers that shine out into the media. 
 
Finally ambient was turned down to 0.1 and diffuse was turned up to 0.6 to give the room a more light oriented, darker feel.  If I had the will to do another 12 hour rendering I would probably turn the ambient up to 0.25, but this is good, I think.

 
Hope you enjoy! 
 
p.s. Oh yeah, the only post-processing was taking out a bunch of black dots. I had to increase the max_trace_level to 8 due to the high reflectivity but it still left black dots.