Now I haven't really gotten into POV Ray but tried it on this flashlight-the pic on right. Why would it look duller?
  KB

taken from the help files for 3dc ...........

Lighting

The lighting scheme for POV-Ray is slightly different than that of Direct3D so you may find that the final image produced by POV-Ray is somewhat darker, or brighter than the Direct3D produced image. The only way to correct lighting problems with raytracing is through trial and error. Rendering test images in low resolution and without anti-aliasing speeds up the POV-Ray rendering tremendously.

Yes-I read that section. Guess I was looking for more for a " use more spots" or " use lots of area lighting". But of course thats where the "trial and error" comes in.

Yes, that answer was a bit abrupt wasn't it - sorry too many late nights  :-[

Obviously you can add lights or make the lights brighter.

move the lights closer to objects - if you have the lights fading over distance

Increasing  the objects ambient settings might help.

Another way might be to increase the radiosity setting in file / properties (might help - but will add to your rendering time). Radiosity is the amount of times the light will bounce off objects - if I understand it correctly

Hope this helps a bit more ?

Alan

KB,
In older versions of PovRay(3.1g) it would be pretty simple to correct this simply by putting a light source into the flashlight and using the "glow" statement.

With the new version of PovRay, glow can't be used any longer and you have to use the "Media" statement with all it's many possible settings/values.

At any rate you could try positioning a spot light source into the flashlight and tell it to point_at(whatever coordinates) and see what it looks like. It's all pretty much trial and error...

You could also give the surface texture of the glass in the flashlight a high ambient value and see if that will produce the effect you want. If you use one of the pre-defined glass textures in PovRay, this may not be possible, so I would try a simple color texture first.

Les

KB,
I tried to reproduce the problem you had and here's what I get.

On the white surface(for the glass) in 3DC I used a Diffuse value of 60, Ambient value of 100, and Specular value of 90. I took a snapshot using PovRay as the renderer with 4x Anti-Alaising.

Hope this helps,

Les

Hi Les,
 You kind of read my mind, I was trying to make the flashlight appear "on", and am going to toy around with a spot inside, so you tips will come in handy!
 My question refered to the "shine" on the outside, like Alan's robo1. I'll mess with it this weekend and look into POV-Ray.
 Thanks, KB.

KB,
For the shine on the outside of the flashlight, just increase the specular value in 3DC, if you are just doing snapshots rendering with PovRay.

If you decide to export to PovRay, just look for the red texture, and add "reflection" to the color properties line of code(somewhere about 0.2 to 0.4 should work). The higher value you place here the more shine or reflection.

Les

I'll give it a try, thanks again.
  Whats with the "thingypit". Is that Richard laughing in the corner?    KB

Robo was a pov texture (chrome (sp ?) I think - it was a long time ago....) - about 3 or 4 lights were used around the object and radiosity was also turned up to bounce a bit more light around.

For the light to be on you could look at visable light....

Try setting the lens to a glass texture. You can do it in 3dc or you can save the scene out as a *.pov and find the decriptor for the lens and then you just add this.

texture { glass } inside the lens descriptor.

So it might look something like this.

#include "materials.inc"

lens { <0,1,1> <.1,.1,.3> ... texture { glass } }

I hope I got the syntax right, I don't have it in front of me right now. However, povray syntax isn't really that difficult use. The thing that was throwing me was that the {} needs to be surrounded by spaces and the predefined textures are case sensative.


Other than that, it's kind of straight forward.

Just ignore my earlier bable.

KB,
Thingypit is a replacement word that the forums server uses whenever c o c k pit appears in a post. Sort of a foul language buffer mistake since it can't seem to distinguish that word from one that is truly obsene...LOL

Les.. ;D

Hi Les;
 I thought so-couldn't have missed that many keys-not in a row anyway. KB