In article <web.3d5739daafdcd0e888d4e3910@news.povray.org>,
 "Tony LaVigne" <ton### [at] xenomechanicscom> wrote:

> Is there an option to specify a light source as a beam trace (opposed to a
> ray trace)?  The differance in that a ray is a line which doesn't have any
> area (in in't cross section).  A beam represents the summing of a bunch of
> rays that pass closely to the point of interest (location, eye).  The
> closer the ray passes the more it is weighted (gaussian) contribution.  The
> beam would smooth the rays.  However at least 8 extra  rays around the
> center ray would have to be traced to represent a beam, so this could be
> costly.

The dispersion feature comes as close as is possible in POV by tracing 
multiple rays to sample the "beam". There is no single "point of 
interest" to compare each ray against because the entire scene can 
matter, it might be an arbitrary set of solid shapes or a pattern of 
color in a texture, or even volumetric media.

The solution is just to increase the dispersion samples until the 
splitting is not noticeable.

-- 
Christopher James Huff <cja### [at] earthlinknet>
http://home.earthlink.net/~cjameshuff/
POV-Ray TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg
http://tag.povray.org/

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