On 02/01/10 20:52, Christian Froeschlin wrote:
[...]
> Although spherical height_fields are not directly supported
> you can load the the data as an image_map pigment with spherical
> mapping and define a pigment function based on it.

Yes, I'm experimenting with that approach. It takes an age to render,
alas, and I'm getting lots of peculiar noise where the rays of light
from the light source are at a tangent to the surface --- even with a
simple sphere. I'm still tuning, though.

> http://www.econym.demon.co.uk/isotut/pigment.htm

Thanks, that's better than the example I'm looking at now.

[...]
> Alternatively, you could also try a simple blob with
> 270000 components. But parsing will be even slower than
> with the mesh2 approach then.

Interesting you should mention that --- another object I'm going to want
to render is the lunar geoid, represented as a 90-degree spherical
harmonic model. As I understand very few of those words I'm probably
going to end up with another spherical heightmap based on Clementine
data, but it would be rather nice to be able to render the model
directly. I wonder if the blob approach might help there...

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