Tom Melly <tom### [at] tomandlucouk> wrote:
: I'm currently shooting a count of 100000 photons at a block of media (underwater
: scene) approx. 4000*2500*500 pov units.

: Is this a reasonable thing to do? If not, what should I be doing instead?

  If you have lots of memory, a really fast computer and lots of time, then
yes :)

  If you want to optimize, then well... I have never tried optimizing
media photons usage, but some things come to my mind:
  Try to restrict the photons to important areas only. I'm sure that your
camera doesn't even see all that volume anyways, so one way of restricting
is to shoot photons only to areas which are visible from the camera.
  Also photons really far away from the camera probably will just melt
together to form an almost constant fog. Instead of doing it with media
and photons, try putting a real fog which resembles the same effect. You
can use turbulence in the fog and scale it so that it looks like light rays.

-- 
#macro N(D,I)#if(I<6)cylinder{M()#local D[I]=div(D[I],104);M().5,2pigment{
rgb M()}}N(D,(D[I]>99?I:I+1))#end#end#macro M()<mod(D[I],13)-6,mod(div(D[I
],13),8)-3,10>#end blob{N(array[6]{11117333955,
7382340,3358,3900569407,970,4254934330},0)}//                     - Warp -

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