nomail@nomail wrote:
> Hi Christoph,
> 
> sorry for the ambiguous question. Unfortunately I am not very familiar wit
> RT, so please let me explain it in other terms.
> 
> To my understanding, in 'photon-mapping' (or 'tracking' or however it is
> called... ;-) ) photons are emitted by a light source (in contrast to the
> camera as in 'usual' RT) and traced over several reflections and
> refractions. Is this correct? If yes, this is VERY similar to my problem...

More or less this describes the shooting step of photon mapping but this 
is only one part of the whole process.  The result (the photon map) is 
not a very good approximation of the distribution of light in the scene 
in general so it is only used directly for caustics (where the photon 
density is high enough for good results).

So concerning the original question: photon mapping in POV-Ray is 
certainly quite fast in what it is designed for (i.e. distributing 
photons in a complex scene and using the generated photon map for 
rendering caustics.

Christoph

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