In article <3A40F892.A8F39EAF@io.com>, philhall <phi### [at] iocom> 
wrote:

> Hey all. After a long absence from POV-ray, I recently downloaded the
> new version and discovered the new media statement. In the old version,
> I enjoyed using halos to create all sorts of effects, but when I try to
> change these halos over to using the new media object, it doesn't look
> anything like what it used to. Can someone give me some advice? I've
> pasted one of my halo codes below.

There is no way to directly translate from one to the other, you will 
have to adjust things like density and samples until you get the desired 
effect, but media is a more consistent and flexible model, especially 
when you use the sampling method patches in MegaPOV(a patched unofficial 
version, http://nathan.kopp.com/patched.htm). I never used halo, but a 
rough translation of your code would be:

media {
    emission color White
    samples 100, 100
    //you will probably want to change the samples setting to
    //something more like: samples 75, 125
    //of course, the numbers depend on your scene...if you use
    //MegaPOV and method 2 or 3, you can get away with much smaller
    //numbers.
    density {spherical turbulence 1.5
            //use the "spherical" pattern to control the density
        color_map {
            //I don't know what you meant with the "t" channel, 
            //you will need to adjust the brightness of these colors
            //to get the right results.
            [0.0 color rgb < 1, 0, 0>]
            [0.6 color rgb < 1, 1, 0>]
            [1.0 color rgb < 1, 1, 0>]
        }
    }
    rotate < 0, 90, 0>
    scale < 0.6, 0.5, 0.6>
}

You can generally ignore ratio, variance, and confidence, the defaults 
are usually sufficient. Don't bother messing with transmit or filter, 
the brightness of the color defines the density, black is completely 
transparent. Try experimenting with emission media at first, it is the 
fastest rendering.

-- 
Christopher James Huff
Personal: chr### [at] maccom, http://homepage.mac.com/chrishuff/
TAG: chr### [at] tagpovrayorg, http://tag.povray.org/

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