"Reactor" <rea### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Well... basically, when you start to run into the 1600 count limit or the count
> vs patience limit, I've found that some scenes can actually be made to work
> with a lower count than usual by lengthening the pretrace step and dropping the
> error bound very low.  Since one usually sees splotches when the count is too
> low for a given error_bound, if the error_bound is dropped low enough, the
> splotches become very small and distributed such that the shadows and shading
> start becoming reasonably accurate again.
> Depending on the scene, this method can work fairly well.  I have had some
> degree of success on scenes that are indoors and involve sharper shadows and
> rapid changes of light.  Outdoor, architectural scenes involving slower changes
> of light and softer shadows seem to do better with the usual approach.

I see... so what you're basically doing is "de-bundling" the sample rays.

Theoretically this should be somewhat slower, as you probably use the same
number of sample rays (total, not per sample), and just distribute them more
evenly across the whole scene, so the lookup will be slowed down.

However, I can also see how this might smoothen the look of the scene.


Which reminds me... I guess I should check whether the re-used samples are
actually weighted according to the distance to the point in question...

(*digs through the code*)

.... hum... well, there is some weighting according to distance, but judging from
the way that some splotchy images look, this might be implemented poorly. I'll
have a closer look at this.

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