Well, I have to say I did a bit (understatement- that's about all I did in the last few days) of reading, and I choose photon mapping and Final Gathering over Path Tracing.

So, i'll write a photon mapper! Yay :attn:

but, yes, again from scratch. But the first render I post will be photon mapped. No flat colors or anything- photon mapping all the way baby!

now... how to format my integration, cosine weighting, or not? or how should I sample my BRDF model? lol! Just what I have to deal with :p