> What am I missing?

Probably the photons. A raytracer just shoots a ray at a point in the scene,
checks the lighting on that point by looking if the lightsources are blocked
by other objects. Now, when there's a transparent object in the way, the
light just gets dimmed.

In order to truly trace where the light goes, you need photon lightmapping.
What it does is shoot photons out of lightsources and direct those onto
reflective or refractive objects. They will cast solild black shadows then,
but the photons will light the scene where they end up, so a transparent
object with ior 1 will look almost the same.

But then you can use dispersion, and photons don't stay white little
lightsources, but rather are divided into an amount of colored lightsources
that are refracted slightly differently, voila: the dispersion effect is
born!

So, trudge to the docs and look for photons. :-)

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>
Email: tim.nikias (@) nolights.de

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