POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.general : Surcoat-Macros released! Server Time
5 Nov 2024 16:42:46 EST (-0500)
  Surcoat-Macros released! (Message 1 to 4 of 4)  
From: Tim Nikias
Subject: Surcoat-Macros released!
Date: 6 Jan 2005 18:18:30
Message: <41ddc746@news.povray.org>
I've just uploaded the Surcoat-Macros which will take care of coating an
object with samples for further processing, e.g. to create snow, dust, moss,
hair, etc. A dozen days or so ago I have posted several images showcasing
the snow created with these macros (which where then called
Dropsnow-Macros). As the macros have gone to a more broad application (where
snow is just an aspect of it), I've dubbed them Surcoat-Macros.

Some might say this is a double post, cause I also submitted a post to
news-submission, but in fact this thread should be used in case something is
unclear or needs a much more detailed explanation than I give in the
example-files and the Help-File. Also note that the actual snow-macros will
be following in a few days, once I've cleaned and documented the source
properly...

Anyways, I just thought that several had shown interest in these macros, so
I fixed them ASAP. :-)

BTW, the direct link would be
http://www.nolights.de/download.html#surcoat...

Regards,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>


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From: GrimDude
Subject: Re: Surcoat-Macros released!
Date: 6 Jan 2005 21:19:53
Message: <41ddf1c9@news.povray.org>
Tim, forgive my butting in, but I have to know something. Right away when I 
saw your snow macro I was struck with an image of water vapor building up on 
the wing of my plane as I waited to be refueled. Planes are curvy, so it 
beads up until enough amasses in one area and then a drip forms. I stare at 
these things all the time, because not only do I study hydrology in 
reforming land areas (civil work) but I also play with Pov-Ray. So, I was 
putting your approach with snow together with water and thinking... just 
d*mn! Heh.

Have you tried that out yet?

- Grim


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From: Tim Nikias
Subject: Re: Surcoat-Macros released!
Date: 7 Jan 2005 05:47:43
Message: <41de68cf$1@news.povray.org>
> Have you tried that out yet?

Nope. Like I tried to explain, the Surcoat macros only sample the surface of
an object evenly, with a small speed-up I came up with to make this process
more efficient. Any standard user can take the object and throw millions of
samples at it and hope to get a good coverage, I've done some discretization
steps and pre-testing to make things more efficient and ensure that there's
a fairly even coverage.

What you do with the data is something entirely different. So far, I've only
written a small macro-set which will take the samples and check their
vicinity to walls and how large they can be in order to model something that
looks like a layer of snow on the object. I'm currently planning a macro-set
which will place hairs on the samples, so that I finally have a toolset to
grow fur/hair onto objects.

For your application, a simple approach might be to cover the bottom of the
wing with samples. Then, select samples within a certain radius and check
the lowest sample, place a "drip" there. Repeat this, probably with varying
size and varying center for the radius-check (a quite obvious step, I hope
;-) and you should get something you could work with. You can of course take
a different approach or create some more overhead to make a more extensive
test for a drip, but the above technique might already be sufficient.
Note though that this can be quite slow and tedious to parse (checking
thousands of samples again and again if they are in a certain radius!? There
are several speed-ups to be implemented here, like saving the centers for
the radius-check within an array and successively updating the lowest point
for that center in a second array, effectively only parsing through all
samples once), so you should implement something to save the results to disk
right along with it.

Once I've got the Surcoat2Snow-Macros cleaned up, you'll have a source to
derive inspiration from for this kind of stuff. :-)

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>


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From: Tim Nikias
Subject: Snow-Add-On released!
Date: 7 Jan 2005 09:38:49
Message: <41de9ef9@news.povray.org>
Well, the first macro to convert the Surcoat data is released as well: the
Snow-Macro. It was demonstrated some time back in p.b.i and is used in my
latest image "Miss you (when you're gone)", which will be uploaded into my
gallery once the final render is completed (which has taken over 1.5 days so
far, and a few more hours are to go).

The ZIP includes a small example which is probably very useful for the
copy-paste-approach, and to fumble with. :-)

Enjoy,
Tim

-- 
"Tim Nikias v2.0"
Homepage: <http://www.nolights.de>


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