So, I'm still working on the fighter. 
(http://www.coyotesdaughter.com/VoidSphinx).  I decided that I wanted to
put navigational running lights on it, like a ship or an airplane would
have, and I modeled what I felt was a very nice light, set up a clear
half-sphere around it, and filled it with scattering media, white, at a
0.1 extinction level.  This worked beautifully, except for one thing....

At any significant distance, the light vanishes entirely.  In order to
see the whole length of a nacelle, for instance, I have to put the
camera at eleven meters (with 'units' arbitrarily defined as
centimeters)... but at this distance, I can no longer see the light.

Obviously, this is unacceptable... you can see aircraft running lights
for a /really/ long way.

So how can I increase the visibility of the light?  Will making it
brighter help?  I read that if you set the fade_distance to higher than
your camera's distance, the light is actually brighter than it would be
if you didn't include the fade_distance statement... but what happens if
you set the fade_distance to an unreasonably high number, such as
1x10e6? 

Is there another, simpler solution I'm overlooking?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Dawn McKnight      | "Who cares what the hipbone's connected to? I'm in Neurology!"
McK### [at] maccom   |					-- Justine Devlin, M.D.

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Of course, moments after I'd posted this, I realized the problem... I
was translating the nacelles out from center, so I could check the
efficiency of the macro which colored them red-for-port,
green-for-starboard... and the translation placed the light out of the
camera's view!  D'oh!

The questions still apply, however.  What /does/ happen if you set the
fade_distance to an unreasonably high value?

-- 
Dawn McKnight      | "Who cares what the hipbone's connected to? I'm in Neurology!"
McK### [at] maccom   |					-- Justine Devlin, M.D.

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Dawn McKnight wrote:
>
> ...
> The questions still apply, however.  What /does/ happen if you set the
> fade_distance to an unreasonably high value?


Hi,


light_source{<pos> rgb 1 fade_distance 1e7}

is more or less the same as

light_source{<pos> rgb 2}.

Regards, Alberto.

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