This is just a late post, after having read many of the already present
posts regarding blurred reflections... IMHO, the main problem is how blurred
reflections are achieved: either by small normals but high Antialiasing, or
lots of averaged textures. The advantage of the first is the ease of the
script, but the entire image will receive heavy AA, which may take
considerable amounts of time. Averaged textures are more complex to script,
but have better modifiable and predictable results, but don't work well with
too much AA, as texture-averaging along with supersampling is
time-consuming.

What I think would be needed is an adjustable reflection-feature for blurred
reflections. AFAIK (at least thats what someone mentioned at one time)
MegaPOV just did the "average-texture"-operation internally, which was
faster than doing it via script. Still, if the reflection rays could, for
example, take two values, that might be sufficient for most cases. One value
defines the amount of reflection-rays (sample-rate) e.g. 25 or such. The
second value defines an angle, which would define the deviation from the
actual specular reflection. The samples would, similiar to radiosity for
example, be spread evenly throughout the area of the angle-driven cone.
Some extra options, e.g. if the blurred reflection is actually sampled from
a reflection itself, might adjust the amount of samples. That's just an
idea, and I'm completely unsure how easy or difficult it might be to
implement. But IMHO I think that approach would still leave options for
average-texture or heavy AA, but with even spread of the reflection-samples
and angle of specular reflection I think that a general, quick and easy
solution could be obtained that way.

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>
Email: tim.nikias (@) nolights.de

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