I've got a scene with a large body of water where I want to use some photons 
for a small area in the foreground. My problem is that I can't hide the 
transition between the area that has photons and the area that doesnt.

The problem is: the photons get bent by the refraction and the conventional 
light obviously doesn't. Which creates a shadow artefact on one side, and a 
double-lit area on the other.

Now, I can think of a couple of ways this could be fixed, but they're both 
impossible in povray!
Option 1: gradually adjust the refractive index within the photon area, so 
that it matches the non-photon area at the sides, use this to save photons 
then switch it off in the main render. But as far as I know pov doesn't let 
you gradually adjust the refraction. Or does it?
Option 2: Adjust the photon spacing so that we have a lot of densly packed 
photons (using a smaller gather radius) in the foreground area but really 
low-quality photons in the distance. This will give really nice lighting and 
be more accurate than what I've got now.

For the time being, I'll just use photons on a much larger area so the 
transition's far enough away to not see it. But I'm using literally 10x as 
many photons as I need for the effect I want.

Anyway, I'm just posting this here to see if anyone who knows more about 
pov's photons than me can tell me if either of those options are possible, 
or if there's any other trick.

Thanks in advance for any help
-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

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