> I am building some physical models and animations that will travel in
> and out of earth's atmosphere.  I don't need photorealism, but I would
> like something that looks better than what I have now:
> 
> http://www.launchloop.com/AtmosphereHack01
> 
> That is the result of 3 days of learning about POV-Ray, and a lot of
> plagiarism of other designs (thanks, folks!).  The page has a big (20MB)
> SWF animation, and the .INI and .POV files that made it.  The page is
> a wiki, so you can add comments directly to the page (after registering).
> 
> Questions:
> 
> I am still looking for a good star model - like a map of the real
> stars projected onto the sphere of the sky, not fake ones that dither
> between animation frames.
> 
> I would also like to find a better black/blue/white horizon model than
> the kludge I hacked up with media/emission .
For a realistic athmosphere, you need scattering media. The drawback is 
that it takes longer to render than emissive media.
> 
> Since I will be hanging a lot of detailed structure in the frame
> (much of it off screen), rendering time will become an issue, and
> making this draw faster would be nice.
If most of your textures are mate and those off screen objects don't 
cast shadows on the visible objects, they mostly don't affect the 
rendering speed.
They will, owever, affect the parsing time.
If you use a macro frequently, like in a loop or nested loops, you 
should place them in the file where they are used the most, or the main 
POV file.
> 
> I would like to be able to "force the seed" for random number
> generation - any way to do that, besides hacking the POV-Ray code?
The random number generator use a user provided seed and never change 
from render to render. So, there is no choice BUT to force seed it.

The "random" patterns also don't change between renders, unless you 
scale, rotate or translate them.

There are 2 "realy" random features:
crand and jitter.

crand is a finish element that should be avoided.

jitter is used in antialiasing and, optionaly, with area_light and media.
> 
> 
> Any suggestions?  BTW, I am a lousy programmer, and the code is
> poorly commented, so if bad style is offensive, please do not read
> it within an hour of eating  :-)
> 
> Keith
> 
> 
>

Post a reply to this message