>>>>  (One cool developement idea for povray would be, I think, that if a
>>>> surface has transparency, no reflection and no ior, iow. rays just pass
>>>> through unmodified (just taking the color of the surface), povray could
>>>> skip incrementing the recursion counter. That way you could have and
>>>> indefinite amount of transparent surfaces even if max_trace_level is
>>>> small.)
>>
>> My thought would be that after a ray hits the max trace depth it should
>> ignore transmit, filter and reflection for that hit, and return a pigment
>> color instead of just returning black. In many cases where there is
>> multiple semi-transparent, or partially colored reflections, this "guess"
>> would result in a pixel that (after being shaded by the first hits) would
>> be somewhat correct. In other cases you'd get multi-color speckling,
>> but that is just similar to the black speckling we have now.
> That's whey you have adc_bailout. It can be used to limit the depth when 
> the last surface contribution fals under the threshold.

I think you misunderstand, I mean when a ray hits max_trace_level it
could return just the color from that hit, then follow the normal
tinting of the previous hits. Instead it returns black.

ADC_bailout just is an early exit of a pixel that already is colored
mostly correct. The default bailout is 1/256 or about 0.4%. What I'd like
to see from a ray that hits max_trace_level is a color guess instead of
just black. If it ends up within 5 - 10% then it might look passable.

Raising ADC_bailout would make more pixels inaccurate. Some pixels
would return after fewer hits.

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