Thanks for the comments, everyone!

There seems to be a consensus for making her transparent... this in fact was
my original intention, but there were two problems. Firstly, other bits of
her become visible, making her more confusing visually and swamping the
background objects. Secondly, when transparent she exhibits severe media
artifacts in the form of saturated pixels, which I have been unable to
remove.

Having thought about it, the main reason people expect ghosts to be slightly
transparent (but only to background objects, not themselves) is just because
that's the cheapest and easiest way to achieve it with movie/TV special
effects. I can see no way to do it with POV-Ray that doesn't involve fairly
nasty hacks or post-production (illegal for the IRTC). So I shan't lose any
sleep over it! :-)

To respond to a couple of other points:

--- EagleSun: ---
> Where did you find this model?  Her hair is nice, which means you found a
> highly detailed model.
The model is Aiko3 from Daz, posed in Daz Studio. The hair is Moko hair by
Yamato ('specially for Aiko). It is good hair, isn't it!?

> Is that a photo of her on the shelf?
Yup.

> You mentioned that there is too much detail, but I don't think so.
I meant just on the ashtray. I'm not toning down any of the wider detail,
don't worry! This is one of those scenes where one could just keep adding
stuff in forever...

>(not sure the "ambient" key word will do, so consider an additional hidden
> light source).
Somebody else mentioned some external light, too. I've tried a low
fill-light but it just makes it look like there's a TV on in the room
somewhere out of sight. I'm going to play with the lighting a bit more,
maybe extend the range of the light fading but lower the overall intensity.
Test renders are quite lenient; at this resolution, ~15 mins if I turn off
the area_lights and radiosity.


--- s day: ---
> I think it is great as it is, the floor normals look pretty good and give
> the impression of a carpet.
Excellent, glad you thought so. I wasn't sure about it myself.

> The girl is a really good model and I like the glowing ghost effect how is
> that done?
Ho ho, trade secrets my son! I shall put an outline of the technique in the
scene description for the submission. It's quite simple, if a little
tedious. Actually, the girl was one of the quickest elements in the scene
to render.

> I guess the fireplace texture is the only thing that I am not too
> keen on the grate just doesn't look right (maybe it needs a bit of black
> soot or something)
Agreed, it needs darkening a little. 'Twill be done.


Everyone says she looks nice! Although her eye sockets are empty so if you
can see her face full-on she looks a little scary. :-/

Bill

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