Alain <aze### [at] qwertyorg> wrote:

> > The planet[s] should be in a union that's translated at the end.
>
> Then, during the devlopment phase, place your sun some distance away.
> That way, the radiosity contribution will be visible and not totaly
> hiden by the direct illumination.

By "the end" I meant the end of the file or scene script, not the end of
development. The light source is very far away already, it's just also very
bright.

> Another reason to use version 3.7...

Indeed. I am hoping soon to look into what it would take to upgrade on Mac OS X
Lion.

> Just a note about the spherical pattern:
> It's centered at <0,0,0>
> It's value is 1 (rgb<1,1,1>) at the origin and drop to zero at a radius
> of 1, then stay to zero everywhere.

Thanks! So I read in the documentation.

Unfortunately, although this is very close to what I need, it won't give a
realistic exponential die-away curve like we see in earth's atmosphere:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth#Pressure_and_thickness
I may need a custom function after all, but that is beyond my current
experience. I love learning new things, but it'll be a bumpy ride! ;)

> That quadruple planet just can't exist,
> the center planet may survive, but the 3 moons would be ript apart by
> the gravitational gradient and degenarate into a massive ring of
> debrits. Think Saturn's rings, but about 10000 to 1000000 times denser.

You're thinking of Roche's limit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche%27s_limit

It's actually very interesting that you bring this up, because this was a
serious concern of mine when designing the planetary system. I worked out all
the physics according to my knowledge, and I think it could theoretically work.

Note that the planets make one full rotation (one day) in about 5 hours (4.70
hrs in my scene script). The system spins far, far faster than earth does, in
order to compensate for the greatly increased gravity.

When redesigning the bitmaps for the cloud layers, I'm going to have lots of fun
with the meteorological ramifications of a massively larger Coriolis effect,
among other things.

Again, this is all copyrighted by me, and thank you all so much for indulging
me! :)

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