A bumpy glass bowl where the thickness of the glass varies, made as a test of my faked volumetric glass shader.
There is still a little noise in some of the multiply refracted rays and the darker parts of the shadows but after just over 43,000 samples I needed the machine it was rendering on for something else 
I uploaded the shader group to Blend Swap last week, you can find it here: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/67624
looks nice…i love caustics…43.000 samples…why?
It damn near looks like Amberina Glass so I would say your shader is pretty good. The caustics are really nice as well. But I think 43,000 samples might have been a little in the overkill area.
Anyways Good Job.
This is a good example of the fact that Cycles can render almost anything given enough time.
Have you applied some application of the ‘glossy blur’ option at all, because it can actually allow Cycles to render out lightpaths that it would miss otherwise.
Yes 43,000 samples is probably a bit excessive. I had been making random objects to test the glass shader, didn’t bother saving most of them but this bowl I liked so I left it on a progressive render over night. I could probably have stopped the render in the morning but I just left it running and went to work. hence just over 43,000 samples.
As it was just a test I just used the default settings. I’m experimenting with the Filter Glossy setting at the moment, thanks for the tip.
WOW, both to the shader and to the samples used, I didn’t know you sample that high
You just select progressive from the performance rendering parameters and let it cook 
I’ve got it rendering again with Filter Glossy set at 0.2, any higher and the caustics lose definition, over 62,000 samples and there is still noise. I have a few things on this week so I can leave it for a while yet.
I’m not sure how much Filter Glossy helps, The bright caustics converged faster but are noticeably less well defined but acceptable. Any gain is lost as other areas of the scene are way too noisy.
How about making a turntable animation of it? 
