I have been working on replacing the old sharp cornered rail with a new
rounded and beaded rail nusing the trace trick I posted about last week.
The new rail conforms to the curve of the hull much nicer than the version
I made using the prism and spline approach. (You can see a small portion of
the new rail at the top of each image)

I decided to turn the camera around and take a look at the far side to make
sure everything looked correct. Wait a second....where did the normals go
in the shadows? PANIC! My planked texture looks awful...off to the docs. Lo
and behold....Normals go away in shadows when radiosity is used...I can't
believe I didn't remember this. I even remembered the images in the docs
when I looked it up.

The top image shows the image without "normal on" set and the bottom image
shows the "normal on" set in the radiosity block. The difference in
rendering time was minimal with such a simple normal (35m 18s with normal
on and 34m 31s without). This was on my windows 2000 1.6 Ghz laptop that I
use on the road.

Still learning!

Tim

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