Hi,

I've been working on a random space scene generator. The first prototype is
attached.

I've been drawing space scenes for a while (10 years!) in POV-Ray, but I
recently wanted a way to randomly generate and position the objects in the
scene.

This version draws distant stars, nebulae and planets. The stars are hundreds or
thousands of spheres, the nebulae and planets are textured using built-in stone
and granite textures. It's best to override the textures that have a high
ambient value. All the scene elements are controlled using random seeds.
Consequently, the composition isn't always great, but it renders very quickly.

I've disabled the asteroids, suns and lens effects (flares, glows, lens dust,
etc.) for now. They're mostly based on Chris Colefax's awesome lens flare
plugin, but it's giving me some problems when multiple effects are present.
Without these effects the scenes become a bit boring and dark. :-(

There's a single global variable called randomizer, that will randomize all the
other parameters. To get a completely different scene, you can just change the
randomizer value. In the attached scene, I based randomizer on "clock" so it
will generate a bunch of random scenes. (See comments in the code).

The code is still a mess, as I'm still experimenting with stuff. Anyways, feel
free to experiment/modify the scene and post your feedback and your pictures.

Happy raytracing,

Rob.
---
Rob Fitzel
www.fitzel.ca/dart

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Attachments:
Download 'asterisk_prototypea.zip' (6 KB)