"ZainAnak" <nomail@nomail> wrote in message 
news:web.42de5e3fa93ad1b23b6b98ba0@news.povray.org...
> Bob, thanks for all the help!

Always welcome to any I have.

> sort of area light setup?  All I really want, after all, is the sun lines
> to be a *little* blurrier than normal- I don't want everything bright in
> the scene to glare out, like your sample code would do.  Here is my 
> current
> light:

 light_source {
  <-5000, 4000, 15000>
  color rgb <0.8, 0.4, 0.2>*4.1
  area_light 150*x, 150*y, // dimensions, or physical size
  4, 4 // number of sources for each axis (above). integers only
  adaptive 1 // sampling rays (more is slower, but better. integers only)
  jitter // smooth shadows, without this you would get banding
  circular // make it round not square
  orient // turn toward scene objects (works in conjunction with circular)
 }

Ha ha ha! Well, you're right. Why not keep it simple? Heck, I'm just glad 
you got me going on Samuel's light-bleed idea, otherwise I might have never 
had such a thing here.

When you're dealing with area_light the important things are size of the 
array and smoothness of the shadows. I've added in what might be okay with 
you're scene but you'll definitely need to adjust the x and y dimensions to 
either narrow or widen the resulting shadows.
The number of sources (4 X 4) ultimately determines quality, as well as 
speed of the render, so you might also need to increase that even if it 
slows the rendering down. But if the shadow edges are only needed to be very 
thin you could possibly lower those two numbers (equally and integer only) 
to a 3 by 3 array. All depends on what you see in the render as you make 
adjustments.

Oh yeah, and area_light does not affect surfaces directly, such as specular 
highlights and the diffuse finishes. It's only for shadows.

You would be wise to read up on this in the scene help (docs), section 
3.4.7.5  Area Lights, so I'll leave it at that. Unless you have more to ask, 
please go ahead and do so.  : )

Bob

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