Orchid XP wrote:
> OK, take a quick look at this:
>
>
http://www.wallpaper.net.au/wallpaper/abstract/Abstract%20Car%20Alpha%20-%201024x768.jpg
>
> So, it's a reflective car. But how do they make it *look*
> reflective?? I mean, it doesn't take much to tell POV-Ray "please
> compute reflectiosn". But that, alone, doesn't make the thing *look*
> reflective. I've tried all sorts of things... but no matter what I
> scatter around the place to reflect off things, they just don't look
> very reflective. :-(

Two points here.

Firstly, you need to have an interesting and realistic environment for the
object to reflect.  In that example there are the clouds, a bright horizon,
and a bright sun.  For a quick cheat, try taking photos of your room (or
anywhere else) and using them as image_maps in the background.  I'm
experimenting with this at the moment and the results look pretty good.
I'll post to p.b.i if I get anything good.

Secondly, curves are best.  Flat objects don't reflect very interestingly.
Even cylinders don't reflect particularly well, because they only curve one
way.  You need to add rounds to your objects if they are geometrically
"square".  If you look at a square box, the edges will have highlights
because the edges are rounded, even if the rounds are tiny.  Complex curved
surfaces like cars always produce the "nicest" reflections, but they're
quite hard to model in POV unless you have an external editor for making the
patches.

> Also, take a look at
>
> http://www.pixar.com/featurefilms/abl/
>
> OK, so it's a picture of some cartoon characters. And not terribly
> interesting ones. But look at the image itself. It's sharp and crisp,
> but most of all, it looks lushously saturated. How do you *do* that? I
> can never seem to get the lighting right...

Make sure you set the light falloff to be 2 or higher.  Placing lights is a
very difficult thing to get right.  See where you are sitting now, think
about all the main light sources and how you can model them in POV.  For me,
I have a load of strip lights in the ceiling, but I think if I just placed 5
or 6 area lights that would do the trick.  Then I also have light coming in
from the window, so again I'd place an area light off to the side.

You can check the relative intensities and distances of the different light
sources by seeing where shadows fall and how dark they are.  Move your hand
around at different angles and heights above your desk and see how the
shadows look.  Then think what you'd need to do in POV to replicate that.
That should give you a pretty good start.

Copy the lighting in your room, model a few things around you roughly, stick
a reflective sphere in the middle, render with focal blur and I bet you it
will look pretty good.  Then you can start experiments with the textures :-)

> Similarly, check this out:
>
> http://www.finalfantasy-spiritwithin.com/www/image14.htm
>
> OK, those clouds would probably give POV-Ray a real headache, but how
> do they get the colours so good? Maybe I just suck at this...

I always find a good way is to use the color-picker tool to get RGB values
from photos, then use them in POV ;-)  If you're not using a sky_sphere, set
ambient 1 diffuse 0 then that will make sure that colouur is displayed.

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