On 26-9-2013 22:16, MichaelJF wrote:
> Thank you Thomas and Bill for your comments. Yes, first the fire is to small and
> second the sparks are a bit annoying. The sparks are my addition and I wanted
> them look like the glowing logs of the fire, so I used the same texture. But I
> will address this later.

I think the sparks should be smaller and brighter. I leave it to you ;-)

>
> And for ghosts: Yes Bill, if you will have a ghost like in ghostbusters one has
> to use another approach. In this case Thomas approach is superior. But I fear
> that using a spherical density works well with an object not very far away from
> convexity - as Thomas has shown us - like a head but worse with a whole body.
> Further ghosts are described in history in many forms. Take a look at the first
> "photography" at
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost
>
> That is more the kind of ghost I had in my mind. I tried such ghosts earlier
> after your original approach but yielded some annoying white spots mainly at the
> joints.

I agree. I prefer the "ectoplasm" effect of an internal media. I 
remembered the descriptions in "The land of mist" by Arthur Conan Doyle 
(when did I read that...? more than 50 years ago!) where the spirits are 
described as taking shape from a kind of thin mist emanating from the 
medium.

The added spherical density in my ghost is awkward indeed and certainly 
not to be used everywhere. However, marble or agate might give 
interesting results when properly scaled.

>
> http://www.tc-rtc.co.uk/imagenewdisplay/stills/index395.html
>
> (In the current scene you can see white spots at the armpits of the ghost, but
> this are stars from the background by chance. With the next version I will have
> rotated the stars away from this points.) With an df3 approach this should not
> be possible (in theory).
>
> BTW: the artefacts I considered as radiosity artefacts turned out to be a miss
> scaled sky pigment producing this strange Moire effects. I never expected that,
> but you will find the most stupid errors ever at last.
>
> Here is the next version correcting the pigment error, exchanged the ground from
> a badly scaled height_field to a mesh and rotated the stars out of the ghost.
> Accidentally the new ground moved the randomly placed trees, but may be it is
> better to have the ghost in front of a tree. The ghost is now scaled according
> to Cousin Ricky's proposal, but it still looks younger as intended. The small
> deformations of the arms and legs are due to a slight warp to the density and
> not to the original MakeHuman figure.

Note that my own interpretation of "25%" is at fault. Experimentally, 
from a box, I concluded that an x-scale 1.25 was about correct.

Thomas

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