This one was done with the Cheetah renderer- 24 fps- 297 frames- 600x450 pixels- just over two hours.
The first try was 15 hours 30 fps and 1000x600.
Falcon quality is great but slower unless you need good transparent/refractive caustics and such stuff.
For your cups I don't think you need Falcon, but don't let me stop you
I don't think I've seen much animation done with Falcon so go for it.
Added: I used Ambient Occlusion.
After trying Falcon I just can't go back to cheetah. Being a photographer.. I just can't stand the fake look of GI, Radiosity, etc.. Path Tracing all the way for me.
And this is where I wish we had:
- Distributed rendering
- Pause and resume rendering
- Render in layers/passes
- GPU accelerated rendering
Right now after 10.5 hours I'm at frame 125 of 270 lol.. I might just stop it and continue rendering later (it could be a bit easier with a pause and resume function tho).
..and never looked back