dbott wrote:
> Well, I am looking forward to seeing your animation and Johns.......????? It
> inspires me to keep on learning new rendering techniques with pov. I spent
> most of Saturday learning Carneholm smoke generator that follows a spline.
> By the end of the afternoon I managed to produce a small test.
> http://www.eastsoundsuites.com/animations/smoke.mpg

That's a nice start! You may want to play with the StartTurb 
and TurbIncRate settings of the generator to get a smoke 
that dissolves over time.

Of course, smoke/volume media eats CPU cycles like little 
else... no matter which software. In Cinema, there's the 
"PyroCluster" plugin suite to get those effects, since it 
doesn't know anything like the PovRay media effects AFAIK. 
They start out with a default "trace step" of 1 by default, 
which in my scenes usually means 1 = 1 cm. Hint: slooooow.

For this reason, i've kept well away from these effects...

Since this time i definitely need a menacing mass of fiery 
rolling clouds (if only to hide the fact that my 
demon/dragon model has no feet ;), i've caved in and read 
the manual. After this, i've upped the trace step distance 
to 60 and shrunk the precision to 1%. Result: 1 frame ever 
30 seconds. Happy :)

Oh, and i learned that the plasma noise that creates the 
cloud-like structure has a parameter called "phase" which 
needs to be animated by hand - the default non-animated 
setting makes "copies of a frozen fireball floating up to 
the ceiling while slowly turning black" :)

Well, at least it works now for an animation. A freeze frame 
looks a bit "blotchy" and artefacts-ridden and would need 
much more render time...

-M

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