Creating fake portals to decrease the noise in the scene

Before we start, it is important to state one thing about the scene we are going to prepare in this chapter. Cycles is a path tracer, and for path tracers, closed spaces are hard to render. This is a chronic problem of this kind of renderer. There are several methods to help reduce noise, but as Cycles is still under development, they haven't been implemented yet.

Getting ready

In this first recipe, we will observe a couple of tricks to make the situation a bit better, but in general, it is good to know that to have this scene noise-free, we will need a lot of samples and a lot of time to render.

Now that we know this, let's open up the Chapter03_Empty.blend file and start setting up our scene!

How to do it…

To create fake portals, follow these steps:

1. In the World settings, set the surface color to RGB 0.85, 1, 1 and Strength to 0.600.
2. Turn on Ambient Occlusion. Set Intensity to 0.700 and the Distance to 12.
3. Add a sun light...