I see WP has replied already -

I'll follow up with some thinking out loud.

1. As clipka will probably eventually point out, POV-Ray is a raytracing
software, not a commercial scientific or astronomical visualization package.  So
keep in mind that there may be limitations on what you can realistically
accomplish.

2.  Related to the above, there will be a certain distance / unit limit due to
the computational, representational, and storage methods used to process the
data.  As such, there will be rounding and float errors, etc.
Just check out the infamous RingWorld thread(s) and any astronomical or full
scale terrestrial/planetary discussions.
So, you'll also run into the real world problem of trying to measure a small
change in LARGE numbers.   Your signal may get swallowed up in the computational
error noise.

3.  I don't believe you can currently do anything like an interior_map, or apply
a pattern like gradient or spherical to an interior IOR.   This is something to
seriously consider as a future feature, but as far as I'm aware it's not yet
possible.


Which means you may need to do something clever and unrealistic to give the same
overall effect.

In the meantime, I might write a simple scene that modeled the ideal path of the
refracted ray, and plot that as a sphere sweep, spline, etc and put a box target
at the intended impact point, and see what happens when you simulate the light
ray over such long distances, with such large numbers.

Also, you can scale down your scene by a few orders of magnitude, so that all of
your numbers fall within 1e-6 < x < 1e6 or whatever the upper and lower bounds
currently are.

Post a reply to this message