In article <40ab68da@news.povray.org>, Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> 
wrote:

>   Each surface hit and consequent new ray will cause a recursive call.
> You don't need an infinite amount of recursions for the program to run
> out of stack space: Just put some thousands of transparent surfaces in
> a row and trace a ray through them.

Note that this isn't strictly necessary...those intersections have 
already been done...when there isn't any refraction, it is possible to 
step through transparent layers in sequence. However, POV just finds the 
"best" intersection and starts over again. This might make a nice 
optimization for media containers or other uses of transparent 
non-refracting objects, like lens flares...

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: <chr### [at] tagpovrayorg>
http://tag.povray.org/

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