Hello,

I'm working on an outer space animation.  I'm generating a starfield using a
large sphere and the Starfield macros included with starts.inc.   Here is
the code (taken from a tip I found online)

sphere
{ 0, 1
  hollow // So it doesn't interfere with any media in the scene
  texture { Starfield1 }
  scale 100000
}

During the first part of the animation, the camera doesn't move.
Originally, the antialiasing was causing the stars to flicker terribly.
After a bit of studying, I found that turning off the Jitter option cleared
it up.  So far so good.

Now, when the camera begins to rotate, the starfield flickers again (even
with AA totally off).  Perhaps the method I'm using for the stars is not a
good one for animations.  Does anyone have a technique that works?

Thanks,
Tom

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Tom Vanderpoel <tva### [at] wirrcom> wrote:
> Now, when the camera begins to rotate, the starfield flickers again (even
> with AA totally off).  Perhaps the method I'm using for the stars is not a
> good one for animations.  Does anyone have a technique that works?

  I think that the best way of creating stars is to use objects (mainly
spheres).
  You can use Colefax's galaxy include file to automate this.

-- 
#macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb x]
[1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
-1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// - Warp -

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Thank you very much!

The galaxy include file is working very well.  I'm still experimenting with
it though.  I want to use this animation in a video I'm creating using a
digital (DV) camcorder and editing on the computer.  Some tests I've done
still flicker a little bit during the camera move and the overall effect has
a cheap, cartoonish, 'video' look to it when viewed on TV.  The stars look
great on the computer, but look like big ugly white dots on TV.

Maybe I need to play around with the field render options a little.  Anybody
know of a good website that discusses producing animations for TV/digital
video use?

Tom



"Warp" <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote in message
news:3d77b792@news.povray.org...
> Tom Vanderpoel <tva### [at] wirrcom> wrote:
> > Now, when the camera begins to rotate, the starfield flickers again
(even
> > with AA totally off).  Perhaps the method I'm using for the stars is not
a
> > good one for animations.  Does anyone have a technique that works?
>
>   I think that the best way of creating stars is to use objects (mainly
> spheres).
>   You can use Colefax's galaxy include file to automate this.
>
> --
> #macro M(A,N,D,L)plane{-z,-9pigment{mandel L*9translate N color_map{[0rgb
x]
> [1rgb 9]}scale<D,D*3D>*1e3}rotate y*A*8}#end M(-3<1.206434.28623>70,7)M(
> -1<.7438.1795>1,20)M(1<.77595.13699>30,20)M(3<.75923.07145>80,99)// -
Warp -

Post a reply to this message

Tom Vanderpoel wrote:
>The galaxy include file is working very well.  I'm still experimenting with
>it though.  I want to use this animation in a video I'm creating using a
>digital (DV) camcorder and editing on the computer.  Some tests I've done
>still flicker a little bit during the camera move and the overall effect has
>a cheap, cartoonish, 'video' look to it when viewed on TV.  The stars look
>great on the computer, but look like big ugly white dots on TV.

Some flicker may be unavoidable if the resolution of the animation is too
low - each star object (sphere, or whatever) may cover too few pixels to be
sampled properly, but making the star objects too big obviously produces
stars that don't look like points anymore. You might want to experiment with
the star object size. Anti-aliasing will improve the situation
because of the increased sampling across the star, but a good solution
would be to increase the animation resolution (I guess that this not
possible with a made-for-TV animation!).

The white-dots problem; I suspect that this may be a result of using spheres
as the star objects. You could try replacing them with onion-textured
transparent discs, for one example. Each disc would have a smoother
drop-off to the background than a "sharp-edged" sphere.


Tom York

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