it's a dragon tree. they look like that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_(plant) i agree that it would have been better if there had been some more time to tell the story but things like the toppled apple box isn't really a plot flaw to me. maybe the owner just took a while to notice.
yes, the renderer seems to have some issues. there is some flickering and aliasing going on sometimes and in the original render resolution it's more noticable than in the scaled down versions. they will render a 4k version. maybe the scaled down version generated from it will look better. i hope the renderer will get improved though in the future.
