Thank you everyone for your comments and suggestions.

I'm fairly happy now with the surface or the marble (the chipped normal),
and though the swirly bits are still not quite right, they are much closer,
and I think I now have an algorythm will work, it's just a matter of tuning
the parameters a bit more. The colour of the marble has also been changed
slightly to give a greenish hue (thanks to those who suggested this, it does
I think improve the look)

Problem now is with the shadows which are being cast by the marble, looking
at the shadow of the broken marble nearest the camera - the JPEG-type effect
around the dark shadow I am happy with - this is caused by the area light,
and can be lessened up by increasing the number of elements in the area
light source (currently 5x5) and by adding the jitter keyword.

The bit which is concerning me is within the shadow of the semi-transparent
part of the marble, the colours are not blending well - it gives me the
impression of an image which has either been heavily compressed when
converting into JPG or an image which has been enlarged and smoothed,
neither of which are the case.

the light source is as follows:

light_source

  lamp1_pos
  color 1

  area_light <3,0,0>,<0,0,3>,5,5
    adaptive 1

  spotlight
    radius 3
    falloff 6
    point_at lamp1_tgt
}

Can anyone help me out with this little problem ? Am I doing something wrong
with this light source - I'm not sure if you are meant to combine area_light
and spot_light in a single light source, but I couldn't find anything to say
I cannot.

The tiles have a normal on them, though it is fairly subtle. they are
slightly reflective also, might these factors be contributing to the effect
?

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
--
Duncan Gray
(warning: may contain traces of nut)

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