I am building some physical models and animations that will travel in
and out of earth's atmosphere.  I don't need photorealism, but I would
like something that looks better than what I have now:

http://www.launchloop.com/AtmosphereHack01

That is the result of 3 days of learning about POV-Ray, and a lot of
plagiarism of other designs (thanks, folks!).  The page has a big (20MB)
SWF animation, and the .INI and .POV files that made it.  The page is
a wiki, so you can add comments directly to the page (after registering).

Questions:

I am still looking for a good star model - like a map of the real
stars projected onto the sphere of the sky, not fake ones that dither
between animation frames.

I would also like to find a better black/blue/white horizon model than
the kludge I hacked up with media/emission .

Since I will be hanging a lot of detailed structure in the frame
(much of it off screen), rendering time will become an issue, and
making this draw faster would be nice.

I would like to be able to "force the seed" for random number
generation - any way to do that, besides hacking the POV-Ray code?


Any suggestions?  BTW, I am a lousy programmer, and the code is
poorly commented, so if bad style is offensive, please do not read
it within an hour of eating  :-)

Keith

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