Quote - Dusty,

Quite true... except... I can't remember the last time I tried to do anything remotely resembling this effect.

For me, not with the time and trouble.

As I stated above... your mileage may vary (and obviously does!) 

Quite right!

Somehow in my ramblings I forgot to add in that if you don't need/want caustics, Firefly can  do everything you need. Regardless of the renderer used, you will need to learn how to optimise your materials and lighting for your image. One big advantage to using Firefly is that with a lot of the available content, most of the work has already been done for you.

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