Sounds like you're taking the brute-force approach, and the aforementioned thesis could show how to improve that. The powerpoint is surprisingly clear, IMHO. F

Sounds like you're taking the brute-force approach, and the aforementioned thesis could show how to improve that. The powerpoint is surprisingly clear, IMHO. From the paper's conclusion: "We propose a new approach to find significant light paths in clouds via searching for their collector area which comprises their entry point on the lit surface of the cloud. In addition to this new formulation we have proposed a new, GPU-based algorithm to find these collectors and compute their contributions in interactive time. Similarly to our previous model, we account for the varying anisotropy of light transport by treating separately light paths of different orders." Of course, that's avoiding assumptions about how easy it is to integrate in your rendering... ;)