Hey, gang.

To whomever it was who said he was a 3-year user and yet still a newbie, I
sympathize.  I've been mucking with POV since '97, and I still frequently go
back to my old scenes thinking, "Wait a second...  How do you define a light
source again?"  Okay.  I admit it.  I'm an idiot.

But anyway, I've noticed a problem with all of my height fields.  When I
zoom in on them, there are often white (or very light) patches on them that
don't make any sense to me.  I don't know if the weird shaping in spots
makes the traces skim over areas or if the normals at those parts are just
perfectly aligned with the light source to cause weird problems (actually,
moving the light source doesn't help, so that ain't it).  I'm just clueless,
but this makes it frustratingly difficult to create landscapes since these
spots don't look terribly realistic.

Anybody have any words of wisdom for this old newbie?
An example statement is below, and anyone would like to see image output (or
input), let me know; I just wasn't about to clutter the newsgroup with it
without being asked (and even then, should I post it in binaries?).

Thanks!

- m




// example height field possessed by demons of stupidity

height_field {
 sys "C:\mydocu~1\povfiles\height_field\rollinghills1.bmp"
 smooth
 translate <-0.5, -0.25, -0.5>
 scale <10, 4, 10>
 rotate -5*z
}

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