Note the focusing of light and colour bleed on objects. It's blocky because it uses a cube to query cached photons instead of (rightly) using k-nearest neighbours. As a side effect of this, the irradiance is also guesstimated, which is why the image brightness doesn't look right at all.
This scene was used to check for proper stitching and orientation of the skybox cube map. The entire scene (nearly) can be seen with just a reflective sphere!
render time: 1840s (2014 i7 4790K @ 4.12GHz). This scene was used to test the fresnel implementation. The reflection in the floor fades as the camera tilts down.
Note the higher reflectivity at the edges (grazing angles) and the obvious blocky shadows caused by the lower polygon model. Shading is still smooth due to the interpolation of normals.
Note that the background (skybox) image is blurred and not blocky thanks to the bilinear filtering of image textures. This skybox face has a texture resolution of 1024px×1024px.
render time: 30107s, reflect levels: 3, refract levels: 16, shadow samples: 32, supersampling: 2×2. At a refractive index of 1.5 (glass). Upping from 2 to 3 reflect levels killed the render time.
This used easing settings of "0.0 0.05 0.1 1.0". At 33% time in to the next keyframe the camera would have only moved 5% in distance to the next keyframe.
