Final gathering with 8 monte-carlo samples. 1m photons, 100k caustic map photons

Looking very good, but I suspect that my caustics map is showing on the walls. I think I need to further limit the caustics.

some scene tweaking irradiance calculation, consistent units, etc has solved some of the seemingly missing global illumination and caustic! The reflections and refractions are still weird.

final gathering with 8 samples eliminates the caustics but does brighten up the scene

caustic map only, you can see that it definitely looks different than the example scene

Increased sample count to 16 to reduce the glossiness noise. Caustics and the refractive sphere in the reflection still looks strange

Looks good, but I notice that the refractive sphere is black in the reflection. Also, my caustic is more outlined than the example image

Fixed some of the lighting and the refractive sphere. Also, some caustics are visible

added a russian roulette style termination probability but it has some strange artifacts, mostly those circles of color where they shouldnt be

fixed bounce indirect and direct lighting straight from photon map, currently ignoring refraction/transmission

updated brightness for the photon map. good sign that they are hitting the non-diffuse surfaces since the previous render doesnt show those as illuminated

diffuse direct lighting only, seems pretty dark but looks reasonable

first attempt photon map visualized with 5 million photons. The max brightness seems very low