Homework 1
This is my first homework submission. Here you'll find both a .rar file containing the required material, and also what extra work I've done.
Upload new attachment "Homework1.rar"
Extra 1 - photon mapping
Instead of doing the suggested inter-surface reflections using photon mapping, I decided to try out the much more spectacular-looking caustics effects. I switched to a near-perfectly transmissive glass material, and altered the scene settings to facilitate my objective.
Result
This is the final result, using 500k photons for caustics. The algorithm has converged to a pretty believable image. Notice the nice See below for some intermediate steps.
Intermediate 1
Using only 10k photons for caustics, the map gets far to crude an the artifacts plenty.
Intermediate 2
Stepping up to 100k photons, things begin to look better, but the sharp details are still missing.