"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "cbpypov" <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm trying to render a high quality "cover art" for a physics thesis
> > (nanophotonics). I have basically two questions:
> >
> >   1. What is the best way to generate a "glowing field distribution"?
> >   2. What is the best way to illustrate a light ray or "photon path" coming from
> > an emitter, say a small glowing sphere
>
> I would say that you should look at Paul Nylander's work
> http://www.bugman123.com/index.html
> as he's and engineer, and has done an awful lot of very professional quality
> scientific visualization with POV-Ray.
>
> > For 1): Say I have field values in 3D that I could assign to desired colors and
> > brightness values. So that that I have e.g. a list of (x, y, z, R, G, B,
> > brightness).
> .....
> > So how can I achieve something like
> > this?
>
> You use an EMISSIVE media.
> I'd also consider generating your field as a df3 file, and then you can "sculpt"
> the media density with that df3 information.
>
> Also see the owrk of Paul Bourke:
>
> http://paulbourke.net/miscellaneous/povexamples/
>
> I presently do not enjoy media, and almost never use it, so others may have
> other / better ideas, and they will assuredly have more details on HOW to use
> media to do what you want.
>
> > for 2): They should moreover be small particles emitting focussed beams or maybe
> > glowing wiggly rays. Does anyone have an example of how to implement this?
>
> I'd say that you'd need to define a vector field, and then use that to place and
> orient your line/ray/wiggle shapes.
>
> Serendipitously, I recently tried to implement a "Perlin noise flow field" from
> Dan Shiffman's Coding Challenge (he uses Processing):
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoM9oKOAKY
> in POV-Ray, but I couldn't work out the last bits and get it to function
> properly.
> Perhaps I can supply my code in its present state and you could use that as a
> good starting point (and perhaps debug it in the process  :D  )
>
> > Thanks in advance
>
> Certainly:   good luck!

Thank you very much for your quick reply! It really guides me into the right
direction. However, I would really appreciate if someone could elaborate on HOW
to actually do it... Maybe it is me, but I cannot find a single line of POV-ray
code on Paul Nylander's page!? There are very similar things to what I am trying
to do, but where is the code?

The df3 format sounds nice, but right now I could not find out how to generate
it except for dealing with the specifics manually (the data is in available in
python right now).

Moreover, I'd really enjoy getting your code and to see what can do with it :)

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