Foreflies in PMC - A newbie Question

[voon]

I just wanted to see what caustics can do and just made a plane as sandy ground, a plane of "ocean" simulation in blender over it with a "water" material from the LiveDB and a cube in it for some added fun (and obviously bad connection to the water, as no physics happen there ).

I set caustics to 0.02 (just saw this elsewhere in the forum) and rendered 500 samples. The result is attached.

Question: Is this just a normal amount of fireflies when only 500 samples are being used and the only advice here is to render much longer? Or can it be reduced, without harming the cool caustics too much?

Extra question: If I record water with caustics like this ... but much more about it ... say my camera covers several kilometers of water.... can you do some sensible rendering, so that only close caustics get renderd nicely, and those in the distance, that you can't see anyways, not? Something like a falloff for distance. I guess it would not hurt the render much, but speed up render time?

[kavorka]

500 samples is very small. I would render it much higher. A lot of my renders go to 10-20k