> And I'm posting it here so I don't get backed into a corner
> (pun intended) alone while trying to help him.

Arg!!! Arg!!! Arg!!! I'm so sorry about that.  Darn Outlook
Express has the "Reply Group" button right next to the "Reply"
button. You aren't the first I've made that mistake with.  I didn't
even know I'd done that this time till I saw your reply here.

> Hi Carl.

Hello Bob,

> Well, glad you explained that this is about tacking a trail start
> down and stretching it along from there. I wasn't catching onto
> that idea at all, before now.

I was initially trying to find out what the best way to do that
was.  I.e. stretch the shape or put the shape in place first with
a texture like this "color transmit 1.0" and stretch a visable
texture over it from the start.  At the moment I'm not sure how
to do either though.

> I was only thinking of a blur left behind the bike. Looking at
> TRON DVD on shelf and it doesn't even show any of that,
> must see movie again.

The bike only leaves a permanent trail when its on the game
grid.  With a little digging I'm sure I could find a nice screen
grab from the movie. But here is a picture I've already made
with POV-Ray.  Check it out:

http://www.tron-sector.com/gallery/show.aspx?ID=1037

I can make just about any still image I want and now I'm
trying to to take a stab at animation.

> Growing the trail along as the bike moves... guess that
> could be done... maybe by giving the sphere_sweep the
> number of points as 'frame_number'. Or at least some
> integer based on it. Then the points could be gathered
> from an 'array', previously set up, invoking them via a
> 'while' loop which uses the point count to pull them out
> of the array.
>
> Make sense?

Yes... I think so.  But I'm not sure I can pull that off.

> Gee, I hope somebody else out there knows what we're
> talking about and has some ideas too. I never became a
> wizard at using arrays in POV. Thinking it over, I'm not
> so sure it could be done this way.

Well the simple way is to make once scene file for each
strait segment but I think I can do better then that.  Plus
once I start put in more then one bike it would be nice
to have a macro that I could put 2 or 3 paths into and
sit back and watch the bikes go.

> What you asked about the front/back or leading/trailing
> sides is simply a matter of pulling a vector from out of the
> spline by its time (or t) value. Such as I did to place the
> light_source ahead of center. It's just any amount +/- of
> the clock, in that example. And then the question about
> going up walls would be done by adding y values to the
> sphere_sweep and spline vectors.

Thanks... that sounds simple enough.

Carl

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