| "Ian Witham" <ian### [at] hotmailcom> wrote in message
news:395a4789@news.povray.org...
| Hi there,  I'm new to the pov-ray newsgroups... but you seem like a friendly
enough crowd.

Hi Ian.  Friendly? Yes.  That is, until HTML is used to post messages...
plain text is preffered due to the wide variety of newsreader programs people
use here.  Please have a look at posting guidelines at
povray.announce.frequently-asked-questions.  That can help in the future.

| With this in mind I have decided to offer this here picture for criticism.
Don't hold back, tell me how to |make it the best pot plant ever... I was
going for something like a Cantonese Lace. I used SplineTree |and some scanned
leaves for the plant, h.f. for the dirt, and csg for the pot.

I don't know much about plants, this one looks good far as branching and leaf
placement goes, just a bit thinned-out looking.  The detail to the leaves is
nice, even though not very visible here.  You could vary them slightly with a
'turbulence' added in: pigment {image_map{} turbulence 0.05} for close ups or
larger renders.

|The area light shadow of the foliage looks even grainier on a less compressed
image.. how can I fix |this? (make nice soft shadows)

It may be that the area light is near and wide.  If the light/plant distance
were 10, for example, with a plant size of around 1 then I'd have used a
'area_light <1,0,0>,<0,1,0>,4,4 jitter adaptive 1' (situated facing the plant)
but no more than that.  Every situation is different though.  Were you using
MegaPov then adding in 'orient' 'circular' would help it greatly.
I like the bowl, the dirt could use some color variation of sharp contrast at
a small scale using a granite patterned colormap for example.

Bob

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