oh, yeah, i noticed his reflection.  i thought i must have missed something obvious with refraction. it's good to know i wasn't going crazy or doing something absurd.  and really good to know about refraction.  it's annoying to know that a crystal ball won't only not create realistic caustics but will create an unrealistic shadow.  grrr.  yep, i know about the inverse square shader and use it all the time.  i even used it on a point light for an image which turned out pretty well.  there was a lot of ambient light, though, so i didn't get to see how it was working.  and i don't use them often at all (i like to imagine a studio with actual spotlights for a lot of images), so i don't have an instinctive sense of how their light unaltered.  i just remember finding its behavior with distance end fairly weird.  so i thought i'd ask.

will you share your glass and brass shaders with us?  i'm really interested to see how you handle metals now, and i would love to be able to work with windows.