I've posted a scene in the scenes group in the hope of soliciting feedback on
improving it to make it more like the tutorial it's based upon.

I would appreciate any tips.

Thanks.

-Mike

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> I've posted a scene in the scenes group in the hope of soliciting feedback 
> on
> improving it to make it more like the tutorial it's based upon.
>
> I would appreciate any tips.

It's much simpler conceptually if you replace all the
mesh operation details with more descriptive POV.

Part one describes an animated lathe/SOR, I would
sketch out on grid paper the profiles of the mushroom
cloud over time and then make splines that cut
across the profiles starburst-ways. Then a macro to
create a lathe object by sampling the splines at a given
time.

Part two describes an animated displacement map,
since POV doesn't have a true displacement map
feature you need to decide if you want to use normals,
or isosurfaces. POV noise is already perlin, so it can
be animated without pre-rendering. You could look
at ISO_CSG, it has a SOR, then you could add the
noise function.

Part three is texturing, and lighting. The texturing
is almost identical to the noise function, and the
lights are a simple ring of spots, there's nothing
really complex there. Throughout I would use splines
instead of arrays, that way you aren't bound to
keyframes.

Part four is other stuff, rings, ground surge, and
though it's not depicted in Ilya's animation, there's
often shock streamers.

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"Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> It's much simpler conceptually if you replace all the
> mesh operation details with more descriptive POV.
>
> Part one describes an animated lathe/SOR, I would
> sketch out on grid paper the profiles of the mushroom
> cloud over time and then make splines that cut
> across the profiles starburst-ways. Then a macro to
> create a lathe object by sampling the splines at a given
> time.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't use any meshes, I use lathes only. I
have stored the positions of the control points at certain keyframes, then I
interpolate across these keyframes using a macro.

> Part two describes an animated displacement map,
> since POV doesn't have a true displacement map
> feature you need to decide if you want to use normals,
> or isosurfaces. POV noise is already perlin, so it can
> be animated without pre-rendering. You could look
> at ISO_CSG, it has a SOR, then you could add the
> noise function.

Yes, it's too bad POV doesn't have displacement. It looks much better than
simply using normals.

Since the scene is more or less "done" and no longer in the planning stages in
terms of implementing what is put forth in the tutorial, I was hoping more for
specific alterations or tweaks to make it look better. What I mean is, I've
done all the things listed in the tutorial, npow I just want to make things
look better.

-Mike

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"Tim Attwood" <tim### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> It's much simpler conceptually if you replace all the
> mesh operation details with more descriptive POV.
>
> Part one describes an animated lathe/SOR, I would
> sketch out on grid paper the profiles of the mushroom
> cloud over time and then make splines that cut
> across the profiles starburst-ways. Then a macro to
> create a lathe object by sampling the splines at a given
> time.

I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't use any meshes. I use lathes only. What
I've done is stored the control points for certain keyframes and then
interpolated across these points using a macro.

> Part two describes an animated displacement map,
> since POV doesn't have a true displacement map
> feature you need to decide if you want to use normals,
> or isosurfaces. POV noise is already perlin, so it can
> be animated without pre-rendering. You could look
> at ISO_CSG, it has a SOR, then you could add the
> noise function.

Yes, it's too bad POV doesn't support displacement. It looks much better than
just normals.

Since the scene is more or less "done" in terms of implementing what is put
forth in the tutorial, and no longer in the planning stages, I was hoping more
for specific alterations or tweaks to make it look better. What I mean is,
since I've done all the things listed in the tutorial, now I just want to make
things look better.

-Mike

Post a reply to this message