Hello, all.

This is a follow up to my post in povray.general.

I'm doing a basketball based image at the moment, and decided to make the
basketball using an isosurface.  However, coming up with a suitable
image/bump map which could be spherically mapped onto the isosurface proved
a real pain.  The maps I created in Paint Shop Pro never turned out right.
So, after a think, I decided to create the image/bump map using MegaPOV's
spherical camera - what better way to create a spherical map?

Please see the attached pic for what I'm referring to in this bit.

I had to imagine myself in the middle of a basketball (as you do).  What
would cause the pattern that I'd see?  Well, two torii going around me
should take care of the 'up and down' and 'left to right' lines, but the
awkward squiggly bit would take more work...

So, I created a patch model in Hamapatch (1) to simulate the squiggle.  This
was simply two points which were spun with the lathe feature and then
transformed and rotated about until I ended up with the final model.

Next, I set up a scene in MegaPOV (2) with a spherical camera - the yellow
dot - surrounded by the objects needed to create the map, the two torii and
the Hamapatch model.  There was no lights in the scene and the textures used
for the objects was black with an ambient of zero and no diffuse.  (The
funky colours in (2) are just there to show what's what.)  Then I rendered
the map (3), and finally placed it onto the isosurface basketball object as
both an image map and a bump map in the isosurface's function (with a bit of
noise3d thrown in).  The resulting object is shown in (4).

What d'ya think?

I'll post the image it's going in when it's completed.

Bye,
Alan.

--
ICQ 114025688
Black & White?

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