Hi Alain,


> Whenever you use a difference or intersections, the various surfaces
> take the texture of the object that define THAT surface. The end of the
> cutouts thake their colouration from the sphere and their sides from the
> cylinders.


Ahh, I did not realize this. That fact helps a lot.



> You need to make your pierced shell, then place coloured and transparent
> pieces into the holes.
> You can make some sets of cutouts and give each the desided colouration.
> One red set, one green set and one blue set in your case.

I see that I must go this route now. Thanks.

>
> A side note: Why not let POV-Ray compute the end points of your
> cylinders? Just use a cylinder like this one:
> cylinder{0, 10*x, 0.5}

Does "10*x" simply mean <10,0,0>? I'm guessing so. I don't see how that would
make it all that much cleaner though because then I would have to determine the
rotation to place it where I wanted for each one and each cylinder would then
have more data specifying it than in my original case. Unless I misunderstand...


> Then, you rotate it to where you want it. This gives you a cleaner code.
> Also, when you have very small values like 5.66549845232e-15, you can
> replace them with 0 (zero), the difference is absolutely negligeable. In
> fact, usualy, any value smaller than 1e-6 can be changed to zero.

Yes, that's definitely true. But I generate the cylindrical syntax from a python
script that I wrote, and that is how it's outputted with no formatting. I could
make it cleaner and have it report 0 instead of these really small numbers, but
I wasn't intending to use the bunch_of_cylinders block as something that I
planned to read and change by hand anyway.

Thanks for your help! I'll make the changes after lunch and see how it looks!

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On 10/03/2010 03:20 PM, Alain wrote:
> You need to make your pierced shell, then place coloured and transparent
> pieces into the holes.

ha-ha ... I thought making the shell yellow instead of black (without
any sky_sphere) would have led to that discovery ;-)

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Jim Holsenback <jho### [at] povrayorg> wrote:
> On 10/03/2010 03:20 PM, Alain wrote:
> > You need to make your pierced shell, then place coloured and transparent
> > pieces into the holes.
>
> ha-ha ... I thought making the shell yellow instead of black (without
> any sky_sphere) would have led to that discovery ;-)

Hmm, good point. Here's what I think you are suggesting:

http://yfrog.com/epcodebp

And you can see the problem from this image. A somewhat unrelated question: I
have a light source in the center of the sphere. Is there a way to make that
light source brighter?

Thanks,
Brad

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On 03/10/2010 8:46 PM, Brad wrote:
> And you can see the problem from this image. A somewhat unrelated question: I
> have a light source in the center of the sphere. Is there a way to make that
> light source brighter?

A quick answer is yes. Just multiply the colour like:

colour rgb <1,1,1> * 10

Or

colour rgb <10,10,10>



-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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On 10/03/2010 04:46 PM, Brad wrote:
> A somewhat unrelated question: I
> have a light source in the center of the sphere. Is there a way to make that
> light source brighter?

nothing wrong with rgb <2,2,0> for a light color ... fade_distance, and
fade_power are options. Be sure you check out:

http://aries/wiki/index.php/Documentation:Reference_Section_4.3#Light_Sources

depending on the "look" you're going for there might be ways to do this
other than using a light source ... there's more than one way to trace a
ray! ;-)

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On 10/03/2010 05:19 PM, Jim Holsenback wrote:
> On 10/03/2010 04:46 PM, Brad wrote:
>> A somewhat unrelated question: I
>> have a light source in the center of the sphere. Is there a way to make that
>> light source brighter?
> 
> nothing wrong with rgb <2,2,0> for a light color ... fade_distance, and
> fade_power are options. Be sure you check out:
> 
> http://aries/wiki/index.php/Documentation:Reference_Section_4.3#Light_Sources

sheesh ... long day ... this addy would probably do better!

http://wiki.povray.org/content/Documentation:Reference_Section_4.3#Light_Sources

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Thanks for the continued help everyone. I'm slowly making progress.

Here is what I've got so far. The ball, with a Silver_Metal texture, surrounded
by 5 walls. I added a bit of ambient light to it so that you could see the
silver ball a bit better, although I think it looks like real crap.

http://yfrog.com/jvcodeup

Any ideas on how I could light the scene besides this ambient look to make it
look nicer? When I added a light_source right behind the camera it didn't look
too good because of a sort of black shadow that was always visible behind the
ball, as seen in the following:

http://yfrog.com/j5codeghp

Once I get the scene looking a little nicer I play on rotating the ball and
making a movie out of it, but I'm not fully happy with how it looks right now.
Ideas?

Is there a way for me to visualize the light rays that are hitting the wall, as
if there were dust in the air? Would I just fill the observable area with a
white box with almost perfect transparency? Or is there a more professional way
to do this (surely....)?

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Moving the disco ball to the top makes it look a little better just because the
walls aren't all the same anymore.

http://yfrog.com/f7codekp

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"Brad" <bra### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> Moving the disco ball to the top makes it look a little better just because the
> walls aren't all the same anymore.
>
> http://yfrog.com/f7codekp

Just learned about scattering media, so I'll try to figure it out. Thanks again!

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On 03/10/2010 9:49 PM, Brad wrote:
> Is there a way for me to visualize the light rays that are hitting the wall, as
> if there were dust in the air? Would I just fill the observable area with a
> white box with almost perfect transparency? Or is there a more professional way
> to do this (surely....)?

You will need to use photons and fill the scene with scattering media.
Read 3.6.2.1  Media Types
And for an example look at optics.pov in \POV-Ray\v3.7\scenes\advanced

To make this work the container for the media needs the "hollow" flag set.
3.4.9.5  Hollow.

Fun, fun, fun ;-)

-- 

Best Regards,
	Stephen

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