Mary K Casteel wrote:
> 
> I'm working on creating a snowglobe and don't know what to do about snow,
> does anyone have a tip for creating sparkling particles within the globe?
> -Patrick Casteel

Snow has a really beautiful crysaline structure when
looked at under a microscope. When floating in the
air on it's merry way to your sidewalks and windshield
on the other hand they look more like irregular shaped
spheres. If I where going to do something like this
I would consider two courses of action.

   The first would be to make a group of about 10 - 20
different shaped spheres/blobs and translate them into
a random distribution roughly maintaining a spherical
shape. Declare that as a group. You could then translate
several of the groups within the globe and have a fairly
dense snow field. To really rough up the surface of the
objects take a look at the pov sample file called
quilted.pov. It demonstrates the quilted normal
modifier and would do a pretty good job of creating
enough surface facets that you would need for the light
to bounce from.

  The second possibility would be through the use
of Chris Colefax's include files. He has two that
might do the job for you. The first is the object
exploder .inc file which takes a single object or
group of objects and breaks them into a bunch
of smaller pieces.
  The second is his particle generator .inc file
whose name is self explanitory.

Chris's include files cane be found at:

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/

For a texture I recommend something like --

texture{ pigment {rgb 1}
finish{
ambient .6      // more or less
diffuse .2      // a bit more or less
specular 1
roughness .0001 // a bit more or less
reflection .2   // maybe a bit more/don't over do it
brilliance 1    // or more
// metallic     // optional - maybe ?
 }
}

The above should be fairly close and it's effectivness
will of course depend on the surface it's applied to
and the angle that the light is striking them.

Ken Tyler

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