Maciej wrote:
> 
> In particular I would like to render a semi-transparent object, e.g. a glass
> pane with shiny edges, on a transparent background. Of course I would like
> it to cast some soft shadow. Is it currently possible with POV-Ray?

Of course there are limitations due to the fact that an alpha channel in 
an image file only allows to linearly mix the background color with the 
image color.  Fancy things like 'pixel appears blue if the background is 
red but red if the background is blue' are not possible but this is not 
a limit of POV-Ray.

Apart from that you can do pretty much anything you want by rendering 
multiple variants of a scene and combining the results.  I included a 
demonstration how this can be done in the KIO-POV package (icons/source 
subdir):

http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/kiopov/index.html

It uses ImageMagick to assemble the images.

Christoph

-- 
POV-Ray tutorials, include files, Landscape of the week:
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/ (Last updated 24 Jul. 2005)
MegaPOV with mechanics simulation: http://megapov.inetart.net/

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