Stained Glass in a Hazy Room

"Yes, the glass material translated as Refractive automatically."

"Yeah-- like I mentioned the caustics are accurate but could be annoying.  Things that might alter it include changing the sun angle so it's not striking the chair's metal surfaces so directly, changing the roughness of the chair…"

"Here's the latest render using metallic materials. The chrome now looks a lot better. I do feel though that the reflected light on the back wall is too bright."

"Ah-- so that's a function of the material type.  The standard material won't give you a mirror anymore.  You need to change the material to metallic and you should get something more familiar.  Use the Type popdown on the…"

"Pacing a mirror on the back wall (reflections = 1.0, noise = 0.0), you can see the difference more clearly (top image is nXt)."

"You can see from these two images that there is definitely something wrong with reflective surfaces. It appears the light is being reflected, but not objects or textures. In the nXt version (top image), the carpet texture is being reflected in the…"

"It's interesting-- overall the quality of this interior is very high for that short amount of processing, and may be acceptable for certain scenes.  In this one, however, there are some reflective caustics that are taking longer to…"

"ARDECAL now works. Here's the image after 10 minutes of rendering. I do have a slight concern that reflective surfaces seem rather dull. This is particularly evident on the end frame of the desk and the base of the chair."