The reservoir

This scene is based on something I saw on TV a while ago. IIRC, it was an underground water reservoir used by Sydney Water. I've also seen something similar in an episode of Angel - A few seasons back where Darlia is resurrected.

Anyway, this took a while to render because I used two ambient bounces instead of the usual one. This means that the indirect (ambient) lighting is even more accurate, or at least that's the intention. After spending a few days trying to get the lighting right, I spent most of yesterday filling up the ambient cache with readings using the 'rvu' preview program. Then I started my old Athlon-750 server on the render overnight. Eleven hours later (I slept in) it was 33% through. So I stopped it and continued the render on my Athlon XP 2600+ desktop (I'm sure this is a feature that `DivineError would like to have with Mental Ray). It only took another 4 hours to render then. The ambient cache finished up at 106M!

The render was pretty colourless, so I tinted it in The GIMP as well as adding the bloom.