Hello out there!

My problem: shadowless lights and polished surfaces don't work together

I'm sure I already read about this some years ago when I started using
PovRay in v2.x. However, I just encountered the phenomen again. When you
define a scene and use the shadowless keyword to prevent the light
source from casting shadows this lightsource will not highlight an
object with a highlighting surface finish as e.g. phong. Is it a bug or
a feature? I don't know but since shadowless lights are originally meant
to "fill up" the light in the scene it might be a feature.

I'm using shadowless lights because I want to render a complex scene
representing a crystall lattice with some 10000 atoms in it. Not using
shadowless lights inevitabily leads to the inner atoms being always in
the shadow of the outer ones. 
However - even if it is not at all scientific but perhaps artistic - I
might like to have polished surfaces with small highlights. 

Is there anyone who knows a trick to solve this problem except for using
one lightsource for every atom???

You can see an example of what I'm rendering at
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/5432/test/sic.jpg

Uwe.

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Uwe Zimmermann                uwe### [at] geocitiescom	
Dipl. Phys.                     uwe### [at] elekthse 

           Department of Electronics
            Solid State Electronics
         Royal Institute of Technology
                 Electrum 229
           S-16440 Kista-Stockholm
                   Sweden

http://www.ele.kth.se/FTE/personal/pers_uwe.html
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