Amazing work -- both inspiration and intimidation.
How are you managing the lights? Every time I think I have the 'white spot' (or, as I like to call it, 'ich') problem licked, I run into another complication. As best I can tell, it's caused by some infelicity in how SunFlow handles anti-aliasing. (I was trying to track it down, but I found myself waylaid by a search for the optimum process for moving Sketchup models into SH3D. I *think* that's largely over, now, and as soon as I finish writing it up, I plan to return my attention to curing ich.)
Here are a couple of things I've found that can reduce or eliminate them:
1. Increase the maximum anti-aliasing to 3, 4, or -- if you have time and cores enough -- 5.
1b. Alternatively, you might try increasing the minimum anti-aliasing to 2 or 3.
2. Increase the diameter of your light sources. I have to admit, this surprised me, as I've been using small (1/4") lights in custom ceiling-mounted fixtures to illuminate my home plans, seemingly with little trouble. The first time I tried to render this image, though, using those same fixture models, I was plagued by a sprinkling of spots.
I increased maximum anti-aliasing to 4 (or was it 5?) and re-rendered the image; that got rid of almost all of the ich, but it took nearly 9-1/2 hours to render, and it it rendered with a glitch. (Occasionally, my finished render will contain one of the SH3D 'bucket' icons -- the ones that track rendering progress, one per thread -- instead of a bucket-sized chunk of image. As this increasingly happens the longer the render, I suspect it's caused by another application popping up on the execution stack, and SH3D not necessarily recovering correctly.) Even worse, I didn't notice the problem until *after* I'd sent the image to my client.
I'm not quite sure why it occurred to me to try to increase the diameter of my light sources, but I did. I deselected all of the fixtures and positioned 1-? 2?-foot lights at the same x/y but a slightly lower Z. Returning anti-aliasing to 1/2, I rendered it a third time -- and in a fraction of the time, 14 min vs 9.5 hours.
I didn't change the number of light sources or the relative strengths: a 1/4-inch or point source at 20% became a 24-inch source at 20%. Everything else was the same -- except for the missing ich.
Cecilia's ideas are worth trying, too. It's a shame to lose so much depth and realism by having to matt objects; maybe with a little experimentation you can find a spot-free gloss!
Maz
