Some Resources
I am on a never-ending quest for POV-Ray resources, and I made it a point to search for new things today. Collected below are some of the better bits. This update covers refraction and isosurface resources and examples.
Refraction
I am constantly fascinated by Refraction under POV-Ray, so much so that I constantly seek out different materials to add to my collection. I have found a few useful links regarding IOR, including some calculators.
First up is Luxpop, a somewhat intimidating site dedicated to calculating IORs for solids and gases. They have tables, lookups (by temperature if you want to get really accurate) and optical information for many media.
Next is Martin Andersen, with a straight-down list of IOR for various materials. Even though he’s 3DS-Max oriented, it doesn’t make his numbers invalid. Science is science.
I’ve found some interesting applications of IOR. The bottom of this page by G.Foss has a head to head between POV-Ray and SoftImage. I think POV-Ray has the better render, but I don’t think he’s conserving energy. I’d have to see the source to know for certain.
Isosurfaces
In experimenting with Isosurfaces, I have come across two definitive resources. One is the Isosurface Tutorial at econym, which can explain the concept far better than I can anyway, so I’ll not bother to explain it here.
The second is a slightly outdated page (it refers to MegaPOV, the enhanced branch of POV-Ray) from Germany. Still, it is full of useful information and formulae.
At yet another site, Christoph has a pretty good example of some isosurface bricks in his water tunnel scene.
Heck, even I have some works-in-progress with isosurface bricks. For example:
Next time…
I’m looking for resources about texture mapping with images + photon magick. See you next time!