> Hey all- related to my earlier question on washed out colors is one about
> diffuse coloration.  Say I have an asphalt runway in an airport scene.

> Well, for certain technical reasons, it's much easier for me to use image
> maps for the whole runway than to model out the white painted parts, dark
> asphalt parts, etc.

If you were just rendering the white paint, it would be simple: threshold
the image to a bitmap so that the paint was white, everything else was
black or transparent, and use a real texture for the asphalt.  You'd need
to use a PNG image map with transparency (easy to automate with NetPBM), or
tell POV that it should treat black as transparent.

However that won't work with your tri-state (so to speak) images, since the
bulk of your asphalt is grey, and probably different grey in each of your
images.  Two image maps?  One for paint, one for dark asphalt?  Again,
NetPNM can automate that.

I was going to suggest you ensure your ambient light is zero, but you've
already asserted that in another post.  If I were you, I'd make sure that
the blacks in my images maps were rgb 0.  Even 0.05 is boosted to a low
grey when it gets a bit of light on it and gamma kicks in.

Just for a test, try setting your display_gamma to 1.0.  That will darken
everything else in your scene, but if your image maps come right then it
may indicate where the problem lies.

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