POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.newusers : Re: How much is TOO FAR and TOO BIG? : Re: How much is TOO FAR and TOO BIG? Server Time
30 Jul 2024 02:16:35 EDT (-0400)
  Re: How much is TOO FAR and TOO BIG?  
From: Jeff
Date: 5 Nov 2004 01:15:00
Message: <web.418b1a0b35423851c44849310@news.povray.org>
I was too wordy, probably, too long winded in my original post. The issue :
you run into problems when you start to sphere { <0,0,0>,FrickenHugeRadius
}, or you start to translate <0,0,GiganticAmountOfZee>. It is stated in the
FAQ (online and offline, in the .CHM) that there is a problem when using or
working with BigNumbers (especially, according to the FAQ " ... when mixing
large and small numbers ... " (???))

What I need to know is, *generally*, what are the maximum safe numbers to
use in X,Y,Z, translates, and rad-ee-eye?

By the way (Alain): sky-sphere = not an option (for my use) - I don't want
to use it because you cannot use the no_reflection keyword in it. Yes, I
have reason why I don't want the sky-sphere to be reflected on anything.
Yes, I could just define a big "mask" - a VeryLargeSphere with a "bite"
taken out of it pointed at the camera view vector, thus "masking" the
sky_sphere such as to suppress reflections on any reflecting objects... but
then I may as well just generate a BigSphere.

Over the past couple of days, when I wasn't throwing up from the U.S.
elections (OOPS! there I go again...), I experimented with the "many random
small triangles, discs or spheres" method of generating starfields. NOT an
option for the computer I am currently stuck with (old IBM 350, Pentium
166, 128 Mb RAM, 860 Mb Hard Drive, NO 3d Card, just a 16 bit SVGA chip).
This method is too slow with this CPU / RAM.

So... the only acceptable option is to use a Huge Sphere, either textured
with a pigment map or an image map (which I haven't tried yet, but I might
check out the Fractint -> PlasmaType -> Starfield -> GIF thing... ).

Since I am modeling star *systems* (and everything they contain) I need to
know what my *safe* boundries are. Thus I need to know what a *safe* Huge
is as in sphere { <0,0,0>, Huge }.


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