Steve wrote:
> 
> Photon mapping requires that surfaces are divided into finite pacthes.  This
> is, in general, not possible with POV-Ray.   POV-Ray will be most compatible
> with a stored version of monte-carlo.  Monte-carlo "sits" on top of a
> ray-tracer, needing nothing more than to trace more rays.
> 

Not really true... see my reply to your post in the 'box with no lights' thread.
Traditional backwards ray-tracing (path-tracing or light-ray-tracing) stores
its information in either caustic triangles (created by tesselating objects),
or in bitmap images which are applied to the objects via surface (uv) mapping.

The photon map which Jensen implemented stores info in a data structure which
is independent from the scene geometry.

Also, monte-carlo means 'random'.  A monte-carlo ray tracer basically does
what the 'blury-reflection' patch does in POV-Ray, but with a bit more
elegance.  Jensen's approach to photon mapping used monte-carlo sampling
techniques.  Mine uses uniform sampling (with some jitter).

-Nathan

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