Ok, I know its feasible to do this with some textures, if I remember 
but.. Here is what I am trying to do:

1. Create glass for a display case.
2. Place runes on the case surface.
3. Alter the effective "visibility" of these runes, using a smoke like 
effect, which follows a clear pattern of changes, and then loops back.
4. Use this to produce roughly 64 frames of animation.

optional: 5. Apply actual ior, reflection, etc. effects to the glass, 
using a mockup of the virtual room I plan to use the result in.

This will have to later be copied, frame by frame, into a grid of 
frames, so.. in principle, the resulting image would be 512x64, so that 
it fits into a final image of 1024x1024 (i.e., 2 columns, by 32 rows).

Its the Step 3 that is driving me nuts. I tried something similar, but 
backwards, just using pure Photoshop. Applying smoke to the runes, as a 
mask, then applying another mask to this, which determined how much of 
the runes where actually visible. The result was bloody ugly...

So, I thought - maybe raytracing the smoke would work better? Not sure 
media would be the best thing here though, maybe.. a texture that mimic 
the same result, applied to just the runes?

Seriously. As fascinated as I have always been with this program, to be 
perfectly honest, I never made it much past the "how to build a chair" 
tutorials in the book way back when one was published. lol Nearly 
everything since has been mesh, imported to Second Life, or a few poorly 
done attempts to convince POVRay to do things its not meant to, like.. 
using a spherical camera to try to "fake" a displacement map from a 
complex object, and stuff...

I sort of have a vague idea what might work here, but.. :p

-- 
Commander Vimes: "You take a bunch of people who don't seem any 
different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get 
this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."

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