Jeremy M. Praay wrote:
> "stbenge" <THI### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message 
> news:490b59fc@news.povray.org...
>> So, do you want a halo around the objects? Or do you want somebody to 
>> model the bulbs for you?
> If anyone has already done it well, sure.  I wouldn't want someone to write 
> my code for me, though.  ;-)

The bulbs or the halo? You have to be specific :)

I won't model the bulbs for you, but if you want to speed the process 
up, you could probably model them in Blender or Wings... Blender makes 
it easy to add thickness to a mesh, but if you aren't familiar with the 
program, you may find yourself mired deep in a steep learning curve...

> Mostly, I just didn't want to reinvent the wheel here.  The problem is that 
> some things which look good from a distance, won't look very good on closer 
> inspection.

In that case, CSG objects may be the ticket here. A blob object or two 
sor's could make a nice glass bulb shape.

>> If it's a halo you want, I do have experience in that department.
> 
> Later tonight, I'm planning to play around with the Megapov glow features, 
> and see how it looks.  At this point, I'm really not sure how they do what 
> they do, and whether or not they'd be suitable.  Maybe I'll use them in 
> conjunction with regular light sources, or maybe something else...

The glows are nice for many things, and may in fact work for this 
particular project. For instance, for an incandescent bulb you could 
create a series of glows along the "filament." This would look nice for 
closeup shots.

> If I understand how you describe your luminous bloom code, if you have an 
> object with a really high ambient value, it will "bleed" into the 
> surrounding pixels.  I guess I wouldn't know for certain until I've tried 
> it, but that sounds kind of like what I'm after here.

Yes, that's pretty much how it works. The HDR version of my code works 
very well for stuff like this. The effect has an affinity for bright 
values(eg. rgb<20,10,10>); lower, more typical values (eg. rgb<1,.5,.5>) 
do not produce a very visible glow. The HDR version is slower than the 
regular version which is already very slow. Plus, I never extended the 
program to use more than 256 color_map entries, so you are limited to 
about 227 samples max (because the samples are evenly spaced points in a 
disc). I might be able to optimize the code to squeeze a few more 
samples in there, since I probably used fractional loop counters ;)

> Perhaps I'll end up with some combination of effects.  Time to start 
> experimenting...  If I come up with something good, I'll certainly share the 
> code and concepts with anyone who requests.

Well, if you need the luminous bloom code right away I'll try to make it 
presentable very soon. Otherwise I'll be taking my time. The MegaPOV 
glow idea will probably work, though.

Sam

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