I've been playing around with POVRay ever since it was "DKBTrace"...

Anyway - over the years people have come up with all sorts of complicated
techniques for rendering starfields, starry skies, outerspace scenes, etc.
Everything from macros that generate 1000's of spheres, triangles, etc.. to
sophisticated pigments for sky_spheres, to complicated textures for
VeryLargeSpheres. One problem is that regardless of the technique, users
inaviably have to "tweak" for thier own uses, mainly due to antialiasing &
individual monitor characterstics. Even then, in my opinion NO existing
technique is perfect.

It seems to me that it would be easier to have a *built in* feature in
POVRay that would simply turn on pixels?!? (Maybe a *modification* or a
subset of a sky_sphere, except that you can't attach the no_reflection
keyword to the sky_sphere; more on that shortly... maybe an extension to
the background keyword? Or a whole new keyword for what would really be a
simple object... just points in the sky!) Of course the user should have
access to settings and options:
(a) Overall density
 and/or
(b) Obscuration with a density RANGE approx min/max
(c) Color / Color Ranges
(d) Whether the stars should show up on reflecting objects
(e) How many pixels (a DIRECT and SPECIFIC specification) that each point
should take up - better yet a pixel RANGE - maybe a "radius". One pixel, or
four, or 3-8, whatever.

.... I think you get the general idea.

Why control reflection? If you create an oceanscape at night, or a shiny
chrome spaceship in orbit, or consider a glassy cockpit... all of those
objects look like they are infected with "Glowing Space Measles" if using a
sky_sphere (thats why I almost exclusively use a Very Large Sphere with a
texture and no_reflection attached to it).

Anyway - just thought I would offer this as a suggestion / discussion.

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JeffBTX <nomail@nomail> wrote:
> It seems to me that it would be easier to have a *built in* feature in
> POVRay that would simply turn on pixels?!?

  Wouldn't work well with animations. Also, just coloring one pixel eg. white
would often not look good on an otherwise nicely-antialiased scene. A very
bright small spot of light usually "bleeds" its brigthness to the
neighbouring pixels, causing a small amount of blurring (the brighter
the object, the more it "bleeds").

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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