A simple image to show focal blur from my stochastic render rig. The image is
comprised of 10,000 renders, each taking a little under a second. The total
wall time was 55 minutes across two CPUs (2.4GHz Core Duos).

All I'm doing is moving the camera to a random offset each render. The offset is
chosen from the iris image I've superimposed in the bottom right. This one is a
pentagram, but any bitmap can be chosen.

The idea of the stochastic render rig is, that on each render pass, a number of
elements are randomly changed (camera position for focal blur and
anti-aliasing, lights sampled from a high density light dome, micro-facets for
blurred reflection, jitter for area lights, etc) so that the final composition
of all the effects is faster than a single render with all the elements turned
on, and avoiding the limitations of things like multi-texturing for blurry
reflections (e.g. the limitation on the number of samples, and the lack of
reflection control).

The picture shows that my code still has some issues - out of focus elements in
certain areas (towards the edge of the picture near the axes) have some odd
distortions. I'm going to have to track down the problem on those...

Cheers,
Edouard.

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