Importons/Irradiance Particles

For another personal tutorial, I did this tutorial about Importons and Irradiance Particles. Basically, Importons and Irradiance Particles are another form of indirect lighting, like global illumination and final gather, and they work together to create indirect lighting effects that can be high quality and take less time to render. The importons and irradiance particles only look at what the camera sees to render things out, so it doesn't spend a lot of time rendering things that won't be seen. Anyway, here's some pictures.

Here's an image rendered with final gather. You can see it looks pretty good, but it took about 21 minutes to render the image... which is a pretty long time.

And here's the same image rendered with importons and irradiance particles. It looks pretty similar to the final gather picture, but it only took about 8 minutes to render. As you can see, importons and irradiance particles allow you to get very good results with a lot less time. Also, you could probably turn up the render settings to get an even higher quality image. Anyway, I guess it's just good to know multiple techniques for adding indirect lighting to your scene.