lighting and/or settings help

[pixie]

No no no noooooooo: Not true!
Its only (!!!) a tonemapping value that doesn't interfere with rendering at all!!

So where is the grain coming from, if not the ISO? and how do I reduce it?

bubs:

Thanks for all the input, I will play around with my lights... I know they are over-complicated.

I have some of the Arroway textures but haven't played with them much... don't quite get the bump and reflective maps yet.

The grain comes from the lack of time. Indigo renders by average, towards infinity the average converge to the correct image, less then infinity you'll have less samples to play for and therefore the average is not as good and shows in form of grain. Of course you don't have to wait an infinite amount of time, but you have to wait until your eye says 'that's good enough for me'.

[Oscar J]

Also bubs provided a number of factors that caused your grain in his first post.

[bubs]

When you say not to use a brightness of more than 80... where is that controlled? I think I am missing it.

Either the 'B' setting (under HSB) in SketchUp or the 'V' value in Indigo. See images below.

I have some of the Arroway textures but haven't played with them much... don't quite get the bump and reflective maps yet.

Arroway textures 'r' and even 'b' maps are predominantly set up for V-ray, to use effectively in Indigo you need to up the contrast quite a bit on the maps. You may need to experiment to get best results, but quite often I find that just doing an 'auto levels' in Photoshop works pretty well!

[Zom-B]

Ok... Sorry...just assumed it would...

Well, it at least should, even if by faking noise, otherwise we don't have a real camera do we?

the noise in high ISO photography comes from "imperfect" sensors.
Indigos camera model (and all other raytracers!) is not simulation such "bad technology design" but only optical laws