Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> Kirk Andrews wrote:
> > I'm working on a scene of some ancient Greece-style ruins.  It has proved to
> > be very difficult to get everything to look sufficiently weathered and
> > "ruined".  But here is one of the columns as it stands at the moment.  If
> > anyone has experience or suggestions in ruining things in POV, I'd love to
> > hear them.
> >
> > - Kirk
> >
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> I don't have anything brilliant to add nor can I provide a magic bullet.
> But you've made a beautiful graceful column so far with some nice
> texturing.  As others have said, most find that they reach a point of
> diminishing returns when trying to simulate distress by differencing out
> from primitives with primitives, and integrating those effects with
> perturbed normals,... though there seems no reason that it can't be done
> if sufficient patience and ingenuity is applied to the task. So most
> turn to isosurfaces for real displacement effects from procedural
> patterns.  When render times get large the next recourse is
> programmatically generating meshes where again procedural patterns can
> be incorporated to displace the surface.  Such an approach for
> brickshapes is a macro recently published by Bill Pragnell.  This could
> be adapted for cylinders too.   There are also some heightfield macros
> that might also be useful.


Thank you, those are some useful ideas--I had not thought of using
heightfields, and is Bill's macro posted in p.b.s.f.?  I didn't see it
there.


> Your textures are quite beautiful, the next stage would be to make the
> coloring also responsive to the surface so that grime seems to reside in
> the recesses and so on.  Remember that a factor in the weathering of
> building is the role of bird poop and the like.  Recesses get perched
> on, biology takes its course, then rain causes grime to run and leech
> down the surface.


Ahhh, there's the goal (and I hadn't thought about bird poop, either!).  The
trick is getting that grime *just* in the recesses.  Samuel Benge has been
trying to help me figure out how to do that.  If you have any suggestions
on how that could be done in POV I'd love to hear it.

-- Kirk

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