@sdwhitton - very interesting approach... I was actually fantasizing about that while struggling...

I'm actually very glad I jumped on Octane under stress, the sole fact I was able to obtain something barely passable in just 1 day on an unknown system, shows me the power of this very system.

I'll ...

aaaand this!

Dearest all,
Happy ending I guess!
After a full day of work I managed to come up with something acceptable.
Average Rendertime is 20 minutes, in directlight_AO, filtered with Neat Image to eliminate the noise.

However, the quest to master Octane and understand how to deal with interior nighttime ...

Hi Roeland!
Thank you for the suggestions!

What an adventure: I don't regret having embarked the Octane ship for such an important delivery with such a tight deadline... but it's proving to be more complex than I expected: this is really my first approach to Octane at all, I come from Mental Ray ...

Question: is there a way to use Octane's tonemap on an OpenEXR without rerendering? No, right?

@acc24ex - I tried everything with directlighting; unfortunately it won't resolve correctly all the light sources, especially the neons around the ceiling of the room... the only one which got close was the diffuse(4) mode... which ended up being somewhat noisier and SLOWER than PMC.... also, thank ...

Guys, I'm so thankful for your interest and your help!
I managed to nudge forward the deadline by 10 more hours... so... the light of hope is lit up again :)

I am moving forward with the night shots; rendertime is still unbeareable... but I'm sort of enjoying this fast learning pushed by stress.

I ...

rappet wrote:http://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24643
This post has some tips to my questions about fireflies...maybe help for you.
Render in bigger resolution, do some noisereduction and rescale to smaller resolution may help a lot.
Good luck.

Thank you!!!

Matej and Remon, thank you for your suggestions and remarks!

I am starting to get a good light response:
I changed all light intensities in order to match the watts and now I'm working with 500 ISO, Exposure 5, Gamma 1, linear camera response.
Unfortunately I seem to be able obtain a good ...

Those tiny bright spots, which are reflections (or caustics? / fireflies?) of your overexposed lights, will never get better and look quite ugly. You should probably tone down those lights, which are practically pure white. But now with the tight deadline, it's hard to play with settings and search ...