Josh English wrote:
> 
> I was playing with ripples recentyl, answering another question on this
> server and now I'm the one that's stuck. When I animated some waves with
> phase clock and had the clock go from 0 to 1, it looked like the ripples
> were moving inward, toward the center, instead of away from...
> 
> Plus, it looks like the ripples extend forever... I would like to see
> them get smaller and not affect the surface the further from the center
> the ripples get. I would normally try to get this effect by
> 
>  ....
> normal { spherical
>                 normal_map { [ 0.0 ripples 0 ]
>                                           [ 1.0 ripples 1 ] } }
> ....
> 
> But this doens't work because ripples cannot be used in normal map
> statements (according to the docs) but it DOES work, unfortunately, even
> with number_of_waves set to 1, the center of the ripple is not at the
> origin,but selected randomly...
> 
> Does anyone have a solution to center the waves on the origin (so they
> can be accurately moved) or anther way to give them this kind of
> "extinction" quality so they disappear the further away they get form
> the center?
> 
> --
> Josh English
> eng### [at] spiritonecom
> www.spiritone.com/~english

There are some mysteries about both waves and ripples that have
managed to elude me for a long time as well. While reading
through your problem though a thought occured to me that might
help. Since a ripple will by it's nature form aways concentricly
from the origin like when you throw a stone in the water it's
waves form outside the impact region. If you want them to start
to dissapate as they move outward maybe you could add a clock
value to the scale of the normal. Something like:

normal{
 ripples 1 
 scale< 0.1+1*clock, 0.1+1*-clock, 0.1+1*clock >}

This will scale the ripple larger in the x+z while getting
smaller in the y as the clock goes through the cycle.
This would have a tendency to make it spread out and
thin along the way.

Also remember that frequency will control how many ripples
will appear in a given pov unit.

-- 
Ken Tyler

tyl### [at] pacbellnet

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