"Orchid XP v3" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message 
news:4527b397$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Cube is a placeholder, yes.

Spheres usually make better placeholders when tweaking materials IMO, the 
hard edges of the cube mean you don't see how it interacts with the light at 
all angles, making it very hard to tune effects like specular.

> OK. I'm currently investigating Christoph's waver macro. Seems to
> produce big fractal-like waves. (I'd actually like the ripples to
> radiate from the stone block and follow its shape eventually...)

Well if you want ripples radiating from the block why are you looking at a 
macro for fractal like waves?

Radiating from a block is a bit awkward, I suggest basing it on a function, 
like:
normal { function { sin(8*pi*sqrt(pow(max(x-1,0),2)+pow(max(z-1,0),2))) } }
that should give nice "distance from a square" based ripples, though if you 
plan on changing the shape of your stone it might not look so good.

> The water *itself* is a fairly simple thing, as you say. It's
> transparent, refractive and reflective. So basically it doesn't look
> like anything by itself... gotta have something nice to reflect.
>
> My main problem seems to be getting a decent sky. :-S

Nope I disagree, if you have a realistic water material from this angle it 
would be almost completely transparent, the reflection would only show up on 
the top edge of the ripples (see attached picture). What's important is the 
fall-off of the reflection, which should be either reflection{.01,1 falloff 
5} to fake it or reflection{0,1 fresnel} if you have a realistic ior.

> I wouldn't have thought assumed_gamma 1 would have *any* effect...
> surely that just means that each colour component is raised to the power
> of 1 before being output?

Yeah that confused the hell out of me when I first encountered it. The 
simple answer is that pov knows what your display gamma is, or rather it has 
a default of 2.2. If you don't say "assumed_gamma" it doesn't gamma correct 
from the linear colour space of the pov scene to the non-linear gamma of the 
monitor. assumed_gamma essentially tells pov what the gamma space of your 
scene is, which is a very bizarre thing to do since pov does linear 
calculations on light so by definition it has a gamma of 1, it's very 
counter intuitive but it works!

Anyway I couldn't resist the urge to have a go at a similar scene myself, so 
here's a picture and the source is in p.b.s-f. Most importantly note that 
the reflection on the water is very subtle, without the ripples you'd hardly 
see the water surface at all.

-- 
Tek
http://evilsuperbrain.com

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