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. ;-)

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