Round 2. Slight better image that shows off the fact the gold reflects
some light onto the surface.

The difference between yesterdays heart rings and today?
The glass on the right was rendered with out an image map.
That is there was no environment telling light to go everywhere and
so all the light was coming from just a few carefully placed sources.
On the left, I have added an environmental map and as you can see
the dramatic shadows are no longer apart of the image.

You may wonder why I have made these images so small...

That's because it takes a long time to get enough samples of
the image calculated before you can see a clear picture. Here
you can see the pointed noise in the image somewhat.

I left the computer chewing through the calculations for the heart
rings all night. It had nearly 8 hours to get all the noise out of the
final result which is just an image 320 x 240 pixels large.

Not only does it take hours to chew through the theory it takes
a lot of time to test out set ups. At this point I understand the file
format lux is processing to create the images and now I have to make
sure I'm using the correct versions of everything. It seems the latest
version of the LuxBlend Exporter has a missing module.

That might explain why I'm not see the time savings the
new versions of the software should be giving me.