> I've been playing around with this thing. It is stupendous. I love it. For
> some medias it doesn't make any difference, but for others, my goodness! I'm
> changing to sample_method 2 for good. =)

The old method is still good for cetain things, like very large objects with
complex media inside.  I think it's related to the random sampling.  You will
get pretty much the same result with the type 2 version in my patch using jitter
1, though it won't take advantage of variance or confidence and therefore
doesn't make good use of max samples.

Supersampling could offer the best of both worlds - oh yeah, and there's some
other tests I can do to speed things up.  Since the ray is sampled from near to
far, I could check if the total color is completely white and save taking
pointless samples.  The same is true for total absorption.  For example, why
take samples to infinity if you have a global media that turns white 10 units
away?

I should mention that all the stuff I'm doing is garnered from how halo and
atmosphere worked in version 3.

> I've tested the old vollumetric
> light scenes posted about 2 months ago. They rendered much faster and nicer
> with way lower settings. I also tested my old flame. It is rendering just
> like it used to, except the settings are 1/10 of what they were! This is how
> media should have been introduced.

Halo used to be used for things like light glows and flames, and using even
samples is just amazingly smooth for that kind of stuff.  I think I've mentioned
before that doing it that way doesn't actually make it faster, but it puts the
sampling to better use allowing you to use fewer samples.

> Oh, BTW, I would prefer the keyword
> "method" instead of "sample_method". Just a thought.

I like the idea.  You would have hated the original keyword I was using -
media_sampling_method.  If I can get supersampling to work (well down the road)
I will include that change in the new patch.  I guess I should have put
something in there about backward compatibility not gaurenteed.  :)

> Anyway, thanks Mike!

Happy to hear you are having fun with it.  Try a spherical camera render next
and map it to a sky_sphere using spherical mapping. :)

-Mike

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