povanim and caustics

Coding Python Support
1

hi jms,

i’ve been getting familiar with povanim a little, you certainly deserve congratulations on this powerful script. UV textures seem particularly easy and clean. But at the moment i am having a problem with an experiment in caustics, in the case of light coming through a glass.

i’ve noticed that catmull subsurfs transfer well into povray via povanim, this makes the glass look nice and smooth at relatively low resolution. However, (in povray), caustic rays find the true coarse geometry and create disruptive artifacts in the caustic shadow. By subdividing the object a few times before exporting, i was able to make the artifacts disappear (in povray). However, neither my video card nor my cpu can support the model at that resolution.

Is there a way to trick the caustic rays into seeing the catmull surface? Or another way around the problem?

thanks,
-l

p.s. my system has 1.3 Gz AMD, 512 mb ram, older nVidia w 32 mb

<edit> False alarm, call back the search party. There was something wrong with my model. I remodeled it, and the caustic shadow looks fine now (in povray) with subsurf applied (in Blender).

2

Thanks to use povanim.
Next week, 2 new entries will be added in the patch menu.
It is a surprise.

3

Thanks for the new scripts.

I decided to upload a caustics test file, not that it is a very good example. http://thorin.adnc.com/~gb/

-l

4

Export : 2 mn 18 !!
How many faces ?

Others tests and a tutorial :
http://marief.soler.free.fr/Monsite/povanim_quickref.htm

5

1,425,408 faces. I might have been able to get away with subsurf degree 4, but the contour did not look perfectly smooth. Is there a more economical way?

-l

6

use the blender’s Set Smooth button.