Ray Gardener wrote:
> Hi all, thought I'd share the output of Leveller's recent changes to its 
> POV-Ray export -- textured billboards that auto-rotate to face the 
> camera during stills and animations, plus path-based camera motion.

One thing you could try is to render a scene with just the 3d model of 
the tree from the same general direction as the camera will view the 
actual tree in the final scene; then use this image as the visible 
billboard representation of each tree in the scene.  That will tend to 
mitigate the "Doom corpse" effect, IYKWIM.  For each frame, render the 
tree from that frame's view direction.

The model will be the only thing in the scene and should render quickly.

Also, the shady side of the tree will be darker than the sunny side of 
the tree.

For the shadow, you would use one consistent image_map for all of the 
frames, rendered with a camera where the sun would be, against the 
ground as background.

The upshot is that each frame is done in a two-render pass, one for the 
image_map for the visible tree objects, and then the final render for 
the frame.

For additional fun and games, you could also make specially-blurred 
image_maps from the tree renders, so that when they are used in the 
final render they are automatically anti-aliased and will not flicker in 
the animation.  I used this in my IRTC entry "Robotany" to make some 
lettering smoothly legible without insane levels of anti-aliasing.

Regards,
John

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