Wasn't it miriam english who wrote:
>Hi, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this question, but it
>seems a little obscure for most places...
>
>I'm trying to make a portal in a POV-Ray scene. To explain what I mean
>imagine a teleport device in the middle of a room. All around it you see
>the room, but where the teleport device is you look through it to another
>scene entirely to say, a beach scene. It sounds odd, but I know it is
>possible in other 3d formats, for instance in VRML, a realtime 3d format,
>there is the ability to set up portals (not in standard VRML, but in some
>extensions to the standard).
>
>Of course I *could* composite two scenes in post-processing, but I don't
>like that. It feels like cheating, and I like the idea of being able to
>easily render stereo pairs where the portal has the same depth
>characteristics as the world around it.
>
>Anybody know if this can be done in POV-Ray?
>
>Thanks in advance.

1. You might consider creating both scenes on the front side of the
portal and making everything in one scene have the no_image attribute
and the other scene have no_reflection. Use a mirror as the portal. The
tricky bit would be getting the shadows right. I think you might need to
have a light group for each scene to ensure that objects in one scene
don't cast shadows onto objects in the other.


2. I seem to remember an old trick whereby you could have things in one
scene bounded_by something that's the shape of your portal, and things
in the other bounded_by something with that shape differenced out of it.
You might have to rig things so that POV doesn't override your dodgy
manual bounding, and I don't have any clues about how to get the shadows
to work. It does have the advantage that you can have portals to more
than one destination in the same image, whereas all mirrors in method 1
would reflect the same stuff.


-- 
Mike Williams
Gentleman of Leisure

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