Hi all,

I'm working on an animation of an optical integrated circuit. So far the
animation is mostly done, however I'm not entirely happy with the textures
and lighting.

At the moment the light pulses are light sources implemented using MegaPOVs
glow extension, however the textures all have a zero diffuse value. The
effect I was aiming for was something reminiscent of an electron
micrograph, and to achieve that affect I'm using another of MegaPOVs
extensions, the angle of incidence texture option, and then perturbing the
normals with a little agate. It looks ok, but not quite as eye catching as
I was hoping. To clearly see the pulses the textures have to be relatively
dark which has limited my options some what.

The texture I'm currently using for the 'optical wires' is (which I
shamelessly lifted from Zeger Knaepen):

texture {
    pigment {
       aoi
       color_map {[0 rgb 0][.4 rgb <0.804, 0.82, 0.85>]}
    }
    normal { agate agate_turb 1 scale 0.01 }
    finish { ambient 1 diffuse 0 }

Finally the animation has a hard file size limit of 5MBs, so I have no
choice in the relatively low resolution which also restricts some of the
fancier texturing options.

So does anyone have any different texturing/lighting options? Any feed back
would be greatly appreciated.

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