All, Thought I'd pass along another variation of Sam's silhouette image 
to isosurface technique. This one showing how to make planar isosurface 


like : abs(z*(1000/9))+Fnct00(x,y,z).grey-0.52. The value 9 sets a z 
thickness of roughly 18/1000 for full black pixels and less thick for 
grey moving to white. The images need to be relatively large. I've been 
using 1000x1000 to 2500x2500 pixels.

Start with an image like blurExample.jpg (scaled down as posted for file 

dotify command. With a GIMP pencil I wrote on another GIMP layer 


to create the base star field with dotify then darken it slightly to 
create areas of more stars.

The rendered example result (<30 seconds on i7-920) is shown in 
StarFieldExample.jpg. Another variation can be seen in MadOfStars960.jpg 
where the GIMP supernova effect was used post povray for the supernova.

The colors in the stars in the star field, of the blob-ish shapes, was 
set with several colored lights variously positioned.

Funct00 is something like :
pigment{image_map {"blur.png" gamma 1.0 once map_type 0 interpolate 3 }}

If the opacity of the written layer is 100% the writing becomes solid, 
rounded letters.

Have fun.
Bill P.

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