Podcast by POVers

Dont let me mislead you with the title of this post. The Podcast I'm talking about is not about POV-Ray, its about table top gaming. ( Gaming in the "Monopoly" sence, not the "betting" sence). It just happens to be produced by two people who use POV-Ray. The Podcasts web page even has a rendered image as its banner.

http://www.roll2d6.com/

Tip 17 A Cheat

It's OK to cheat POV-ray, it doesn't mind.
What I'm getting at is that sometimes it takes too long to model a "thing". The time it would take to model is just not worth it.

You want an example?

Well... I was modeling a spaceship and I needed a series of lights on posts to circumnavigate to hull. The Post was a simple cone and I wanted the light to be a Red Glass sphere on top of the cone.

Now I could have spent time putting a light in a clear sphere and playing with the texture of the sphere until it glowed red.

Frankly the size of the object did not warrant the effort that would have taken.

So I made the sphere have a plain Red pigment with a .5 ambient setting that makes it look alight and stuck a point light above the sphere to get the illumination. Incidentally I had top include "no_shadow" in the sphere's definition so that I didn't get a shadow underneath the sphere fom the light above it.

Plain and simple, I cheated. It worked. It looks good. Who'll know?!

Tip 16 Coloured Fog

A number of times I've tried to add "atmospheric media" to a scene to give it some , well, atmosphere, this is slow when it comes to rendering.

A quick alternative is to use the "fog" object. There is a lot that can be said about fog, and I probably will some day. But for now, just consider this. If you use a coloured fog rather than the standard gray-white, can you add an unusual/special feel to your image.

For example, a week yellow fog can add the golden feel you get on a sunny afternoon, or a blue one can add that twilight feel.

Tip 15 KIS

OK, heres a real quicky. Is it close to the camera? No? Well forget the detail. Keep It Simple.

When an object if far from the camera, dont bother modeling all of the details, you probably wont be able to see all of them. Also keep in mind the time it takes to render complex textures. It sometimes pays to keep distant textures simple.

There is artistic merit in this as well, because if its in the distance it's not likely to be the focus of the scene and too much detail will distract the eye.