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sajis997, I mean that the caustic is much more visible. I personally think that's a good thing.

yiningkarlli, in the image identified as the "direct lighting only" image (http://imgur.com/EdZ0yza) there is a visible diffuse component to the material.

It looks OK to me. I also note that your elephant has a more pronounced caustic. More importantly, what do you think?

In a pinch, I think if(generated random number < refractivity coefficient) { Get a refracted ray. refractedColor = trace(refracted ray, depth -1, 1 /* formerly 0 */); } else if(generated random number < reflectivity coefficient) { Get the reflected ray. reflectedColor = trace(reflected ray, depth - ...

OK, let me put it this way. It looks to me like you're not getting a specular reflection of the light source in the mirror ball. That is, LSE paths (light -> mirror -> eye) are not showing up in your rendering. LDSE paths are showing up (light -> ceiling -> mirror ->eye), so you wind up with a dark ...

Given that, along with the fact that the specular materials are effectively removed from your direct lighting calculations, wouldn't ... else if(generated random number < reflectivity coefficient) { Get the reflected ray. reflectedColor = trace(reflected ray, depth - 1, 0); } mean no specular highli...

When computing indirect illumination, what happens when one of your secondary rays from a diffuse material happens to hit a light source? Is it possible that you are doubling up on your direct illumination? One quick experiment might be to double the intensity of your light source, omit direct illum...

Offhand it looks like your LSE (possibly LS(S|D)*E) paths are broken. How are you calculating direct lighting on specular surfaces? If you're doing explicit connections to the light source (e.g., picking a point on the source, casting a shadow ray, and evaluating the BSDF), then the specular compone...

Importance is a necessity for any renderer that traces more than one bounce after tracing a ray from the camera. For example, in a simple path tracer, the "weight" of an eye subpath is accumulated importance divided by the accumulated pdf. At each bounce, the importance is reduced by the BRDF and th...

Without the We term, W(x,w) would just be zero (since some nonzero portion of light hitting a reflective surface would be absorbed). Importance is basically what portion of reflected or emitted light from a surface contributes to a rendered image. In a path-/ray-tracer We(x,w) should generally only ...