I'm now playing with the animation features built into POV-Ray and I wanted
to share the idea of what I'm trying to do.  I'm sure this basic idea has
been done by others and shouldn't be too hard to do but I'm not seeing an
easy solution at the moment.  So here are a few questions:

(1)  In the movie TRON the effect of the rotation of the wheels of the Light
Cycle was achieved by putting a spoke in the wheel that was present in one
frame and gone in the next.  Since the values that 'clock' takes on is
dependant on the number of frames what is the best way to do this as I might
want to play with the number of frames I generate for a given scene.  I'm
also thinking about having blinking lights that follow some pattern.
Something like on for 2 frames, off for 1, back on for 2, then off for 10
before repeating. At the moment I'm not sure how to pull off these effects.

(2)  The light trail...  Lets say I have a game grid that's 100 units by 100
units.  I want to be able to set a path for my bike to follow.  Something
like:

<50,0>, <50,50>, <75,50>, <75,75>, <25,75>....

I think I can move the bike by itself easy enough but I'm but sure about the
best way to draw the light trail.  It should have a rectangular
cross-section and I'm thinking about the idea of generating the whole shape
for the path with a prism then putting a 'clock' dependant texture on it
that's totally invisible in front of the bike position and visible behind
it.  It'd also need a texture map to put a vertical white line on the trail
for something like every 5 units of its length.  Any tips on how best to do
that?

I'm still very green when it comes to POV-Ray and my programming is a little
rusty but its getting better.  I'm sure I'll solve the above two problems on
my own eventually but I think I'm making this problem harder then it is and
I think the easy solution is eluding me. I'm open to any tips you guys can
share or any small pieces of code that I could play with and learn something
from.  With some help I might be able to make some cool light cycle
animations soon.

Thank you so much for your time,
Carl

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