It was mostly because we were often be asked if one could write shaders for V-Ray easily and MetaSL was a way to get a shading language. But it did not get developed…
Best regards
Vlado
WOW!!! that looks fantastic!
Vlado-
Ok im im super excited by these, not sure when ill get to play but im going to be counting the days!!! looks like you are getting some nice results. Id love to hand you a couple of the scene files I had cooked up when we were first talking about this if you want to use them for some tests. Id also be interested to see some times. Certainly its resolving the reflected caustics much better. Any thoughts to if you are sacrificing much for it in the way of introducing other noise?
Also do you feel that the overall image is resolving faster or just differently?
Thanks for sharing!
-Michael
Yes, feel free to send over any test files that you have 
They will be very helpful. You can send them to vlado@chaosgroup.com
Best regards,
Vlado
I have got a large scene that I am very eager to try.
Please let us know as soon as you merge into the nightlies.
Vlado-
I sent you a handful of files to play with. Cant wait to see some results.
-Michael
p.s. I love to pool caustics!
hands up who’s excited about vray 3.0?
sad…I regret filing one years ago myself.
“The idea that I can be presented with a problem, set out to logically solve it with the tools at hand, and wind up with a program that could not be legally used because someone else followed the same logical steps some years ago and filed for a patent on it is horrifying.”
― John Carmack
Vlado-
I hadn’t seen this paper. I might be of interest though at this point im not sure there are too many loose ends for your implementation.
-Michael
Yep, I’ve seen it. I know Iliyan personally too.
Best regards,
Vlado
I was toying with the Mitsuba renderer, which sports just such a manifold exploration technique, and yeah, Vlado is ofc right.
While i’ll admit it’s the funkiest render method i have ever witnessed (with buckets spreading light in the scene before they hit the corresponding raster space of it, leading to progressive brightening of the whole frame from early buckets), the VERY chancy way it uses to determine paths means that unless there’s an awful lot of very detailed paths, convergence will change quite dramatically across renders/frames/slight viewpoint changes.
Still extremely funky to play with.
Some nice results, Are you looking to his work to influence how VRay will be handling the vertex merging? Also Im surprised that their 24hour reference images are so clean. Not sure how those are being approached but they are much cleaner than I would have guessed.
-Michael
Vlado-
Here is yet another little test. Ive resurrected the old winosi scene and set it up to somewhat match a version ive seen in one of the vertex merging papers
The interesting thing about this one is both of the lights are area spheres inside a reflector with a glass lens so every directly lit surface is I guess by definition a caustic.
Here ive removed a lens and you can see the illuminated reflector. Interesting that you dont see this through the lens in the versions where the lens is in place.
If anyone wants to play http://morphographic.com/PathTrace/winosi\_BDPT\_Mirrorball\_004.max
Thanks
-Michael
Veach MLT Room
For fun here is my take on the Veach mlt room setup. Simple for sure but its a nice test all the same. I let this one run today while I was at the office. It was fairly clean within a couple hours. I like the subtle caustics behind the light on the right wall.
Here is the 2012 scene file http://morphographic.com/PathTrace/2012\_BDPathTrace\_VeachRoom\_01.max
-Michael
Do you have the scene for this too?
Best regards,
Vlado