In article <39A5F03A.2F1C4E74@hotmail.com>, Pabs <pab### [at] hotmailcom> 
wrote:

> You seem to be talking about forwards ray-tracing where rays act just 
> like streams of photons.
> POV-Ray does reverse/backwards ray-tracing where since you are only 
> interested in light that hits the camera you trace the path of light 
> hitting the cameras back to its origin so that you may determine the 
> colour of the ray as it hits the camera.

However, there is a POV-Ray patch by Nathan Kopp which does photon 
mapping, which is a sort of forward ray tracing: some of the 
illumination is calculated by tracing photons through the scene from the 
light sources, so it can do refractive and reflective caustics, but 
rendering the actual scene is done as it is now. This patch is available 
in MegaPOV: http://nathan.kopp.com/patched.htm
There are a couple small bugs(cylinder lights don't work as expected, 
for example), but it works very well and is reasonably fast.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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