Folks:

  I'm animating a nuclear powered tank (an "Ogre", www.sjgames.com, or like
Keith Laumer's "Bolo" series).  These are supposedly nuclear powered, rather
large (2-3 highway lanes wide) and rather heavy.

  I'm trying to show a 'heat shimmer' from the rear portion of the body -
the miniatures show a series of grills inthe back and my theory is that it
sucks air into intakes and uses it to cool the reactor.  So - no smoke, just
a 'shimmer'.   I've poked around in the groups here but haven't really seen
anything.

  I was thinking of using some kind of very high IOR clear material in a
cone, and animate it with 'turbulence', although the IOR would have to vary
(decrease) as it got 'higher', not sure if that will work.  I guess I could
make an ISO surface with a clear IOR material also, although that might be
slow.

  Thoughts?

                  == John ==

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Problems you'll most probably encounter is that you will later be
able to make out the shape of the IOR-Object due to the
distortion it produces. I don't know though if disc, facing the
camera with a bumpmap which is even to the edges, could
be a solution, perhaps I'll have a look at that.

Easiest would probably be something like using something like
Paint Shop Pro or such to manually distorte...

Tim

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On Mon, 31 Dec 2001 15:50:14 -0800, "John D. Gwinner"
<jgw### [at] dazsicom> wrote:

>So - no smoke, just a 'shimmer'.

<snip>

>  I was thinking of using some kind of very high IOR clear material in a
>cone, and animate it with 'turbulence'

Not a cone, try a disc facing the camera. Make sure you blend the
normal into nothingness before you reach the edges of the disc so that
they are not visible. The cylindrical, wood, spherical or onion
patterns should do it.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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Hi,

I've had some success before for this sort of thing 
by using wrinkle for a bump map on a transparent 
disc with ior. I translate the wrinkles upward using
the clock variable to animate the shimmer. 

I didn't have to blend the edges when I used this 
technique because of the background I used, but you
probably will as Peter said.

Tom

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