As I said earlier I'm a complete newbie to kerkythea but try the Metropolis Light Transport render preset, do as many passes as you feel is necessary and then you can get rid of the remaining noise with neat image (http://www.neatimage.com/), that's what has worked for me.

Thanks Dave that looks a lot better, what you said about the internal faces and softened edges makes sense.

I'm trying to make a guitar bridge, I made a frame then used the bezier spline plugin to make the surface but it comes out sort of segmented and chunky, any tips on how to make it more uniform and smooth looking? I attached a picture and the file I'm working with.

bridge~.skp

Looking through the competition gallery I came across the attached photo (props to KiraNL), where a SU model is placed in a background which is an actual photograph. It's a really cool effect I would like to learn how to do. I didn't want to hijack the other thread, so if someone could point me in the right direction, maybe there's a tutorial floating out there somewhere, that'd be awesome. I suspect the model would be integrated with the backgroud in a rendering program rather than SU (maybe not?) , and I'll be using kerkythea.

I'm only a couple of days ahead of you in the learning process, but I found this simple tutorial to be helpful http://www.studiorola.com/tutorials/rendering-tutorials/kerkythea-basic-rendering-setup-part-1/

also go through this thread on the kerky forums, has a lot of good information and a scene for you to download and practice on.
http://www.kerkythea.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=4863

Awesome dave, I ended up drawing the symbol, this will save me a lot of time thanks!

I'm trying to incorporate a webding symbol into a 3D text, but only the regular text comes out, not the webding font. What do I do?

cool render arail1, that's what I was hoping to do, Im' gonna try to make a nice bumpy texture for the ball when I have time, I'm new to sketchup and rendering so it will probably take me some time.

I'm sure ill get there, thanks for the help

thanks solo, how did u get everything so smooth?