Hello,

I'm still a newbie trying to render some scientific (or, really,
"scientific") visualizations. One scene I have keeps failing the rendering
with the following error:
"Rendering Error: Too many nested refracting objects."

The scene is basically about a thousand translucent image maps distributed
about some 3D space. The image maps are just colored squares with the image
used as an opacity map. They're of the form:

polygon {
  5, 0, x, x+y, y, 0
  pigment {
   image_pattern { png IMAGE interpolate 2 }
   pigment_map {
    [ 0 transmit 0 ]
    [ 1 FILTERING_COLOR ]
   }
  }
  SOME_TRANSFORM_HERE
}


If I turn down the "max_trace_level" parameter, I don't get the rendering
error, but the scene looks terrible. If I titrate that parameter upwards,
just before all the artifacts disappear I start getting these render
errors.

Naturally, if I turn off the translucency of the image maps, the error goes
away. Likewise if I replace the image maps with simple translucent squares,
there's no problem.

Is there any way I can get POV-Ray to up the limit on whatever is happening?
Or a better way to get around the issue? There are probably no more than
2-300 overlapping objects in any one ray -- that shouldn't be too much to
choke a raytracer in this day and age, right?

Thanks,

Zach Pincus
Program in Biomedical Informatics and Department of Biochemistry
Stanford University School of Medicine

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