Christopher James Huff wrote:
> 
> Why? It "inherits" the ior and media of its interior, the pigment of its 
> texture, etc. There's nothing about photons that ties them specifically 
> to the object, it doesn't own the photons. Making them an aspect of the 
> material makes perfect sense to me. Glass objects have caustics...it's 
> an aspect of glass, not of the objects.

I'd suggest you (and everyone else who thinks photons are just like 
(faked) caustics) to read up how they work before stating such 
conclusions.

The idea behind making photon settings part of the material certainly is 
to make it unnecessary for the user to think about which *objects* he 
wants how many photons for.  But since doing so will not actually change 
anything in the way POV-Ray distributes the photons this will not result 
in any actual improvement of the output quality or the render efficiency 
- it would just create the illusion for the user that he does not need 
to care about which objects should have photons.

What would really be interesting is a way for POV-Ray to automatically 
calculate the target values for the objects that receive photons based 
on their importance for the render result.  There have been various 
attempts for importance based photon distributions, a good introduction 
can (although focussed on global photons) be found in:

http://graphics.uni-ulm.de/Importance.pdf


Christoph

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