Christopher James Huff wrote:
> 
> Another odd little trick I've been wanting to try: normally, when you
> hit a surface like glass, you have to trace a refracted ray and a
> reflected ray. With many transparent objects, this can create a lot of
> rays very quickly.
> The trick would be to randomly choose refraction or reflection. The rays
> would never "branch", they would just take a random path through all the
> possible paths. You would then take several samples for each pixel, each
> sample would take a different path and you would get a fair
> approximation for the pixel without tracing every single ray. I have no
> idea how well this would actually work, but it seems like an interesting
> idea.

But how would you combine the sample values to the final value? Average 
would be much too dark. Sum of course depends on the number of samples.. 
One would kinda have to estimate the number of all possible paths by 
measuring the samples trace depth and then mulitplicate the average by that 
number.

- Micha

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