Can anyone give a newbie some help in creating clouds. I would like to
create real volumetric clouds, and I assume media is the way to go. Does
media respond to light and shadows like a cloud would? Can anyone give some
tips. Thanks.

Matt

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In article <38eb5d73@news.povray.org>, "Matt Savard" <msa### [at] rainorg> 
wrote:

> Can anyone give a newbie some help in creating clouds. I would like to
> create real volumetric clouds, and I assume media is the way to go.

It is certainly one way to do it. However, unless you want to cope with 
huge rendering times and grainy images, you should probably look at 
downloading MegaPOV and use method 3 media. It allows you to get smooth 
images with lower settings(meaning faster renders!).


> Does media respond to light and shadows like a cloud would? Can 
> anyone give some tips. Thanks.

Scattering media does respond to light in that way, although is a way to 
turn it off for individual light sources. MegaPOV has some added 
features to make using media clouds easier. One way to do it is to 
contain the media in a "shell" of one sphere differenced from another, 
like this:
difference {
    sphere {<0,0,0>,2}
    sphere {<0,0,0>,1}
    scale 10000 translate -y*9000
    hollow
    etc...
}
Make sure the "sun" light source is outside the cloud sphere, of course.

An alternative to media is to use layered planes or spheres, with a 
partially transparent texture applied. Each layer is separated from the 
others by a relatively small distance, this can allow you to represent 
the volume of the cloud. This can give great results, but is slow and 
requires a high max_trace_level.

Also look in povray.binaries.images, there has been a recent surge in 
messages related to media skies.

-- 
Christopher James Huff - Personal e-mail: chr### [at] yahoocom
TAG(Technical Assistance Group) e-mail: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
Web page: http://chrishuff.dhs.org/

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