Its been a while since the last update but a lot has happened. I made a lot of headway into diagnosing a lot of problems I was having with my renders. First of all, my carpet fur was killing my machine, so I nixed that. Next was the issue of ever present noise when I used my Portal Lights. that was a combination of two factors. The first being that EACH area light had to have shadow samples higher than 32. Second was the portal lights had to emit direct photons, which seemed strange to me since they aren't emitting photons at all, but it did the trick. Last was the fact that Phsy Sun and Sky had a very blue light emission coming into my scene. I was looking for a warmer color palette and using red/blue shift didn't help much with saturation, just made it a deep red instead. I found this nice little attribute called haze, and that did the trick of pulling a lot of that color out of the light. A lot of what I need to do now is tweak textures, increase my portal light multiplier and increase my GI photons as they're pretty low right now.
edit: Also, I should have thought of this earlier but the usual technique for creating a velvety material cannot be used with FG as incandescence is considered a light emission property. Thus the radioactive pillows. Need to fix that as well.
