I decided to take some time away from other more elaborate POV-Ray pursuits (and
real-life) to make a fun little animation. Nothing fancy...basically just a more
complex version of 'sphere over checkered plane,' with candy colors (no real
textures to speak of.) Plus motion-blur and a shaking camera--both of which
hide a lot of sins! Here are two versions of a typical frame--one is static, to
show what the scene actually looks like, and how relatively crude it is. I
posted the animation over at p.b.a.

This little scene did give me a chance to work on arching electrical bolts; and
I finally came up with a way to animate intermittent/changing 'events' like
this across blurred frames (15 static images per final frame, BTW) so that the
'static' bolts show up across all 15. (Otherwise, a different bolt in *each* of
the 15 frames ends up looking like blurred mush, without much brightness.)

The mountains are a procedural height_field--actually a static one, with the
apparent movement accomplished by animating its granite pattern instead. (I.e.,
the HF triangles remain in place, and the pattern function moves through them.)
To get this to work well visually, a rather high triangle resolution was
required for the HF. So neither the camera nor the main sphere actually moves
much at all.

I didn't use any AA for the animation; a nice side-effect of blurring and camera
shake is that the lack of AA isn't really apparent.

Sometime soon, I'll post my versions of blurring and camera-shake code--after I
finish my other project, the 'stand-in human.'

KW

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