Among other things, Ben T. Scheele wrote:

>     Not too shabby.  I think gold is a hard thing to depict
> realistically.

Especially when I don't have any gold to compare with ;) Thanks for the 
picture, it helped me realise that I needed much more reflection and 
brightness, though I was aiming for a more reddish kind of gold and a 
different kind of shabby (that was a new word for me) wood. By moving the 
lights and changing some parameters I was able to eliminate the stupid 
"brilliance 4" I had for the wood texture

> If radiosity doesn't affect the scene very much, you
> might want to try photons.  They're fun to use with gold textures.

Yep, I tried using them, but with the old layout and textures there was no 
noticeable effect, now there is :)

By the way, do radiosity and photons interact? I mean, would a bright 
caustics spot illuminate surrounding objects? I've seen you can also get 
caustics with pure radiosity (no photons), and I guess these would 
illuminate surrounding objects, logic says photon caustics (and faked 
caustics) would behave in the same way...

> I thought you might like to see a Brazil render my friend John Henriksen
> did of a scene he modeled in 3dmax.  It might give you some ideas.  For
> the table he used a height field generated from a scan of a cutting
> board.  He had to do a lot of work by hand in Photoshop to get the text
> up to such a high resolution.

You mean the text or the texture? There's a TTF font available for the ring 
inscription script (which I didn't use, because I like this one better). 
There's something I don't like in that picture: the text in the inner side 
of the ring is backwards :D

Here's the new version, better now? (with and without focal blur)

-- 
light_source{9+9*x,1}camera{orthographic look_at(1-y)/4angle 30location
9/4-z*4}light_source{-9*z,1}union{box{.9-z.1+x clipped_by{plane{2+y-4*x
0}}}box{z-y-.1.1+z}box{-.1.1+x}box{.1z-.1}pigment{rgb<.8.2,1>}}//Jellby

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