BJMonkey

It's because of the way Normal maps work. They work using angles, which means they're hard coded to one 'elevation' whereas bumps use height which is relative and easily scalable. The reason they can be less is because you can fake that using blending with what it looks like with no map. But it does still look wrong. Faking higher is even more difficult, I believe. :)

Not asking for a constant redraw. Just for the final frame, that always pops up anyway, to stay in view. And, on request, open up for larger viewing :)

And the ability to click/double click it to open it full screen in projector?

Sorry for the late reply, this project's on hold for a few weeks while I gather myself for other parallel projects. Thanks for all the input, I'll try it with the Area lights off when I get back to it. I've started getting some interesting effects using luminance maps on planes, I'll post them when they're more polished. ---- Brook

36 Mins with GI on, and photons. I then promptly did a second render. Area lights only, no photons. 16 mins. You can't see the beams through the side panels being the main difference. I actually prefer the ceiling on the version without the bounce light. The Area lights are the render-time hogs I think... It's noisy because it's only on 20 samples per Area shadow! 100 samples will probably bring it back up to almost 2 hours per frame. Oh, and, ignore the white at the back on the photon render, that's due to it being a slightly unfinished model, I've just found out. *Question* Is it possible to make objects only visible to photon maps after they bounce? I'm gonna try using planes to emit photons next if that's not possible, but I'm guessing geometry area lights will take even longer to render... But I will get more bounce light accuracy as the photons won't escape through the windows :D At the moment the windows are added in in post because it's the easiest way I've found to make them look well lit at the moment.

Ok, I'll try it with GI. (I know about the red lines, I was just showing where the artifacts lay on the grid) But, I don't understand why it works with individual lights, but not with them all working together without GI. I'll update this post soon with GI renders. Stupidly forgot to move the camera into place and change the render size back...

Forgot to mention... 16 seconds to render all lights at once (with botched shading). 9 seconds to render them individually. So if I could avoid post-work it would be considerably faster... 71 seconds per frame plus post work.

Actually, I just recently rendered it using baked lights... Individually, the lights work well. Combining them in photoshop gives this (Ignore the bad colours, it's just testing for now, it's not a final piece) But if I try to render them all out at the same time I get this...

Just testing Area lights and photons in a scene I've created (heavily based on the dojo in the Matrix) for a university project. Still WIP. Mostly poor colours and minimal textures as of yet. 23mins + colour editing in photoshop. Skymap in Area mode. 8 Area lights 800k*8 photons (6.4M) Macbook Pro 2.33 GHz using no rama.