It's strange what things can inspire you when your brain's been
operpoved.

Being the type of person who thinks sunlight is just an annoying glare
in the window, I recently nailed blankeds on the windows  of my room.
(curtains have a transmit of about 0.4 and that's way too much.) This
morning, while I was reading posts, a perky sunray somehow broke in
and lit up the room with soft, indirect, diffusely interreflected,
hard-to-model light. Moreover, some of it hit the top of the
indescribable plastic thing sitting on my monitor (along with an
wooden model of A'Tuin) and produced some really nice caustics on the
oscilloscope gathering dust at the top shelf, then some of it bounced
off again from the oscilloscope screen and produced some really nice
caustics on the ceiling that flickered gently as I was clicking the
keyboard. The other part of the ray hit the side of the aforementioned
plastic thing (which is actually the case of a small mechanical
counter saying " '95: wasted; repairable") and pierced the aquarium
right through the stream of bubbles, and the beauty of the spectral
caustics resulting in this rendered any attemped description
incomplete. The fun really began when I moved my hand (probably to rub
my eyes :) ) and the ray bounced off it and lit half the room! I never
knew that human skin was so much diffusely reflective. The mere two or
three square inches of my palm that were lit by the sun acted as a
real light source, progucing nice shadows (kinda too sharp to be real
:) ), specular reflections in the heating pipes and even caustics off
my recently polished guitar deck that gleamed on the painting on the
wall. Impressive what a 1  x 30 in light ray can do :)

Now the question is, how the heck do I model all that in just a
lifetime? And how many Cray supercomputers will I need to render it?

Any help appreciated.

--Peter

P.S. Based on the still going "Where are you..." thread, most of you
guys are Americans, so I did some conversions to spare the majority
the trouble to do so. 1 in = 2.5402 cm  1 cm =  0.3937 in :)

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