After a lot of experimentation I have discovered why Kerkythea can no longer render my scenes: too many light sources.  I have around 30 light sources in my design.  This somehow leads to problems.  If I remove some/most of them, I can get my render to work.  So work will continue to see if I can reduce the light count.

   Took my last exam today and handed in a 30 page paper—the semester is over.
   Pictured is Ashley.  She likes a little sugar in her coffee.

   This is a rendering of my attempt at a lite candelabra.  Sketchup has the ability to make components that always face the camera, which works great for flames.  However, these do not export to Kerkythea.  To work around this, I tried a technique I have seen used in video games.  Use a flat surface and have copies at different angles, giving the illusion of the 3d surface.  It sort of works, although you can see lines from some of the instances in the flames.  One of the material packages I downloaded for Kerkythea had candle wax, and it looks very much like candle wax—I just changed the color.  The candelabra itself is silver, and the surface it is sitting on is porcelain.  I am going to include the candelabra in my dinning room, but exclude the flames.
   This was rendered on my laptop as the desktop was working on an other project.  This image is 160 passes, 20 hours and 12 minutes of rendering time.
   And to lady Babette: your library is coming.  It will be on the second floor as the only room on the first floor that isn't at all visible is the kitchen.  Before I can construct the library I have to come up with a way to make a good book texture so the library is stocked.  I also need to model some furniture, and most necessary for a good library is a large arm chair.  That, a couple lamps, some small end tables, a large fireplace, and some floor to ceiling bookshelves.  That should make a library.

   As one of the tests I tried a couple days ago to see if Kerkythea could be convinced to do Photon map rendering, I had my laptop load the scene.  My laptop, although 64-bit, still has a 32-bit version of Ubuntu that I've been meaning to replace since this time last year.  Kerkythea runs fine on the laptop, but has the same problems as it did with my desktop machine.  However, while I had it up I decided to let it render for awhile.
   Pictured is a view of the dinning room.  The chairs are not correct as the first version I drew I ended up putting the seats at table heights.  I lowered them quickly, but did a rather sloppy job.  So they have a piece missing in the back that looks odd.  I fixed this already, but left the laptop to render.
   One items I didn't plan for but I kind of like the results is the table.  The texture seems to be pulled into the center as a result of the export process.  I like the way it looks, so I am going to keep it.  In reality I think actually producing a table like this would be rather tricky.  I still need items for the dinning room, but this is a good start.
   The rendering is 266 passes done over 32 hours, 40 minutes.

   A slightly life rendering as view in the parlor behind the baby grand piano.  I recolored the wood on the grandfather clock making it more of a red stain.  I also reduced the shine of the trim and changed the flooring.  Also in this picture one can see the kitchen in which I have added a table, chairs, and a chandelier.
   There is a good deal wrong with this picture.  The image didn't have enough light, and I did a rather odd brightening that I feel took away from the realism.  The glass on the two vases is hardly visible.  And the there are strange textures on both the parlor carpet and the piano.
   I've moved on to adding more items to the dining room, and at some point I will have to work on fixing the poor textures.  However, things are coming along.  This rendering took 13 hours and 30 minutes for 52 passes.  If I had the lights set right it would have been pretty good I think.

   Plans proceed for the large scale animated walk through of my Victorian model, but it has been plagued with problems.  My model has gown to such complexity that Kerkythea was no longer rendering the scene with any of the photon mapping algorithm.  The scene would always give a failure message during the mash building process.
   The model is now a 49 MB file.  Just to be open in Sketchup requires 216 MB of RAM.  Open in Kerkythea requires over 300 MB, and the rendering with Metropolis Light Transport requires around 1.1 GB of RAM.  Currently there are some over 743,000 edges, and more then 350,000 faces.  The Blue Dragon has 4 GB of RAM, and to render in Kerkythea with the model open Sketchup sometimes requires me to close some of the many other programs I run so I have the RAM necessary.  This is the first time I have ever run up against having "limited" RAM resources.
   Not being able to use Photon Mapping as my rendering algorithm was going to be a problem.  Metropolis Light Transport will render as long as you let it—more or less.  The limit for the number of passes is 10,000.  A single pass can sometimes take 10 minutes meaning a single frame could render for 3 days.  An animation of 700 frames would take 135 years which is longer then I care to wait.  However, with some work one can change the upper limit.  I tried an animated set using 10 passes, but quickly ran into a strange problem: each frame had a different brightness.  This made doing an animation sequence using this technique impossible.
   I wondered if maybe the problem of Photon Map rendering was due to the amount of RAM my system had.  I tried shutting down everything that used RAM to maximize it, but rendering always failed during the mesh building process.  In addition, the rendering never used more then 1.2 GB of RAM, and I had hundreds of megs free.
   So I contacted my good friend Pluvius who since I've known him has always been running a pretty beefy rig.  His current system had 12 GB—3 times what I have in my box.  If rendering was a RAM issue, Pluvius' rig would not have any problem.  The test showed Pluvius' box getting errors as well, but not all the time.  But Pluvius had a idea.  Some older games he had run ran into problems with using more then 2 GB of RAM, and there was a patch so these games could get around that.  When I tried the patch, it worked—I could render with PhotonMapping.  Thanks Pluvius!
   Now I am left with an other problem.  The shinny surfaces in my model result in "white specs" everywhere.  This is due to the textures of shinny surfaces and the way the rendering is done.  The problem doesn't happen with Metropolis Light Transport, which is what I usually use.  I've had luck getting rid this problem with antialiasing, but so far no luck.  I have faith though I will come up with a solution—even if it means rendering all the images at a high resolution and scaling them down to reduce the white dot effect.
   The rendering today is of the finished fireplace in the parlor.  There is a window visible as well, which since there isn't any light outside is just reflecting the image from the room.  Unfortunately it rendered rather dark so you can not see much of the detail.

   Today my first video animation of my 3d house.  The rendering is all Sketchup as I have not yet learned how to animate with Kerkythea—so isn't too realistic.  It does, however, show the layout of the house and what I am working toward.    As the video shows, several additions have been made since the last frame was captured.  These include a fireplace in the parlor, and windows.  These two additions required a lot of work in order to incorporate them.  The first floor is already trimmed, so pulling out a wall for the fireplace meant having to redo the baseboard and crown molding trim.  The windows were also sometimes tricky.  My model is very complex now, and Sketchup is exhibiting strange little symptoms.  Sometimes the guide lines disappear because of the viewing angle, meaning I can't draw a line where I want it.  The "intersect with model" many times doesn't work correctly and I end up with strange faces that Sketchup thinks are all connected.  This makes punching holes for windows difficult.  Despite these quirks I can still model just fine and the house is coming along.  Next is highly realistic animation.
   This is my first YouTube video, and I used the service because I've been putting off learning how to make streamable video forever now.  So it's time to start somewhere.