Alain <kua### [at] videotronca> wrote:

> > "omniverse" <omn### [at] charternet> wrote:
> >
> > Specular highlights used for Ivory_M and Ebony_M material/texture/finish are
> > probably too bright unless used in conjunction with fresnel, a feature of
> > current unofficial 3.7.1.1-alpha versions.
> >
>
> Why does those finishes have any emission at all? Emission is only if
> you want a texture to actually glow, even if it's a very dim glow.
> Beter remove all emission everywhere, or set it at zero everywhere.

Well, considering radiosity eliminates ambient lighting I just use a tiny bit of
emission to try and avoid any totally black areas. And also for a while now I've
been keeping ambient to much lower levels than the default 0.1 for non-radiosity
scenes, sometimes ambient 0 in lieu of a very low emission for the kind of
ambient lighting.

I'm used to the idea nothing is completely black unless in space or a cave, or
deep ocean. All of which could still have a very small amount of illumination
depending on the actual environs (glowing fish, phosphorescence) or perceived
unreal light at the eye. In other words I don't believe in total blackness.  :)

I don't expect anyone to use the exact scene as-is without making their own
changes too. I found the old scene warns about 'unusually high ambient' because
the original chess board uses ambient 0.35, and not only that they were using
assumed_gamma 2.2 so POV-Ray 3.7 really made them dark. Changing to
assumed_gamma 1.0 washes out the board.

Your question is very relevant, especially if considering this chess scene to
replace the current file in a new release of POV-Ray. And I did think that might
be a worthwhile thing to do later, but I wasn't going to ask yet. So for anyone
interested be my guest to discuss this further.

Bob

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