"Kenneth" <kdw### [at] earthlinknet> wrote in message 
news:web.4baae0a4649f667b65f302820@news.povray.org...
> Four months in the making! With a cast of thousands! (of objects)
>
> Here's a representative image from an animation which I've posted over at
> p.b.animations. I set this scene up with animation and motion-blur in 
> mind, so a
> still image doesn't really show it to its best advantage, IMO. Everything 
> was
> done in POV-Ray v3.6.1, including the post-processed motion-blur (none 
> here,
> though.) OK, I used Photoshop for some image_maps, and sPatch for a few 
> mesh
> objects in the B-29--the wings and tail. The airplane isn't perfect; the 
> CSG
> engines still need some work, as does the nose/cockpit. When I started 
> this
> project, I wasn't all that interested in getting the B-29 to be 
> technically
> accurate; I just wanted a 'flying scene.' But one thing led to another...
>
> My apologies for not posting any WIPs during the process--I kept 
> changing/adding
> things daily, even hourly. Which meant running yet more test animations. 
> (At
> last count, 153 of 'em!) Helped along with LOTS of on/off #if switches for
> testing various things, plus simple 'proxy' objects.
>
> There are quite a few *cheats* going on here--the clouds, the many 
> reflections
> in the airplane, the cloud shadows on it, the flames. Some to get a 
> particular
> visual effect, but mainly to speed up rendering during the *long* 
> animation
> run--4000 frames over 90 hours, to get 400 final motion-blurred images. No 
> AA
> either (except for this image); but blurring together each 10-image batch 
> helped
> hide the jaggies. The only media in the scene is the black smoke behind 
> the
> flaming engine (and only because I couldn't come up with a good cheat for 
> that!)
>
> About mid-way through rendering the raw animation, I hit on the rather 
> bizarre
> idea of doing 'alternate-field' renders, again to save time.  That is, 
> using
> Field_Render in the INI file.  That cut the remaining render time in 
> half--with
> a decrease in image quality, of course. For a typical still frame, the 
> results
> are quite ugly (especially with no AA!) But 10 such frames blurred 
> together
> didn't look half-bad, in the context of the quickly-moving animation. 
> (After
> doing a final motion-blurred animation test, I picked out the frames that 
> still
> didn't look very good, then went back and re-rendered the raw frames 
> without
> Field_Render.)
>
> I'll add more notes as the comments come rolling in. ;-)
>

Holy crap!  Consider me impressed!  Very impressed!!!

Cheers Dre

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