Ok, here's some things that've been bugging me about raytracing for a while
which might have simple work-arounds.

1.  Shadow fuzziness.  In the "real world", a shadow is nice and sharp when
    the object blocking the light is right next to the surface on which it
    is casting the shadow, and blurred as altitude above surface increases.
    In POV, the shadow is nice and sharp the whole way if default settings
    are used.  How to fix?

2.  Reflections in different type of materials.  With reflection, things
    like highly-polished metal reflect ad infinitum.  Things like lineoleum
    reflect things close to them, but become less reflective as object
    distance increases, with the exception of lighting.  This is not
    quite simply blurring the entire reflection, more like the reflection
    being 'foggy' (but not fading to a specific colour, instead fading to
    'nothing').  I suppose I could achieve this (somewhat) by making two
    renderings (one with fog, one without) and compositing them with the
    desired surfaces from the foggy one overlaid on the other, but it
    seems a hack.

3.  Concerning Media settings (and their application in, of all things,
    Moray).  Toying around with all the numbers is one thing.  Knowing
    what they do to get a desired result is entirely another.  Help!!!!
    Is there any documentation on what numbers in absorbsion/emission/
    scattering colours and sampling/confidence/variance/ratio produce
    good results to simulate specific media (i.e. undersea, dusty air)?
    There're too many variations to really approach it by making one
    rendering under each possibility to use as a reference.

I have yet to test POV3.5, which looks like it has some very cool new
features that I will probably need a faster computer to do as much as
I want with them (in my lifetime, at least...it always did impress me
the fact that POV can render just as complex a scene on a 386/33 as a
Pentium III/700 with the only difference being time, time, time...).

- T. Cook
http://empyrean.scifi-fantasy.com

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