> Anyway, I've been wondering about something... I love lights on Christmas
> trees. And my dad has more sets of lights than you can shake a VERY big
> stick at!! I've been thinking about trying to simulate some with POVRay,
but
> I already know it's not going to be easy. The question is... Why do bright
> lights have an "aura" around them? I mean, you can see a fairy lights from
> quite a distance, considering how tiny they are. If I try and draw them
with
> POVRay they'll be smaller than a single pixel... but in the real world
they
> have a kind of "glare" around them which takes up more space and makes it
> easier to see them from a distance (when they're lit!) Is there some
> physical explaination for this?

Scattering media. Light leaving the bulb that's going not-quite-towards your
eye reflects off of air particles. You can try to simulate it with a *very*
low density scattering media (which is basically a simulation for air
particles, or maybe fog). Make sure you don't use scattering type 1; you'll
probably have the best results using type 5 and fiddling with the
eccentricity value. However, it's probably a lot easier to just use a little
emmitting media around the light to create the glow effect.

 - Slime
[ http://www.slimeland.com/ ]

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