Chris Huff <chr### [at] maccom> wrote:

> In article <slr### [at] fwicom>, ron### [at] povrayorg 
> wrote:

>> Media has the same issues as refraction, actually: it only gets 
>> calculated when you hit another face that points to the same 
>> interior.  If you never do, media never happens.

> Not quite as bad as the ior problem...you could take the media of the 
> faces at each end of the ray segment being sampled, and do something 
> like interpolate between the two while sampling, or compute both and 
> average their results, etc...with ior, you would have to predict the 
> path the ray would take, tracing curved rays...not fun.

This wouldn't work, or rather, it'd give very strange effects.  If you have
two rays that each impact two different surfaces, but intersect at a point,
there is no guarantee that the value at that point would be anything like
similar.  Which means that from different angles, the object could look
completely different, because the rays calculated would be different.  I'd
think you'd have to have an interpolation based upon *every* point used. 
Maybe possible, but very expensive.

Geoff

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