Well, this was going ok until I ran into meshes (possibly other primitives
as well), which use their own internal bounding hierarchy that the shader
can't access or know about.

The methods I've started using to allow implementation of a user-specified
search distance (and speed up the effect) involve producing a cut-down
bounding hierarchy from the scene for picking up intersections along
occlusion rays, and the mesh's internal bounding sidesteps all of that.

Since I use meshes a lot, I decided not to spend any more time on this for
now. I'm going wait for 3.7 and see what the situation is then. From the
sound of it a lot of the code will have been cleaned up.

Attached is the last attempt, with the occlusion pigment providing the
surface colour (ranging from very dark blue to white), diffuse shading
only. Three lights were used, two of them shadowless. Render time (with
non-exclusive use of the processor) was 55 minutes for 128 occlusion sample
rays and +A0.3 +AM2 +r1, on a 2.4GHz P4. You can get a reasonable preview
quality image in about 7 minutes with between 8-32 sample rays.

Tom

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