The basic idea of generating glowing objects came to me when I saw pictures of the solar corona. I got very interested on thinking about light effects near to some object surfaces, since usually rendering algorithms ignore these phenomenons. They just pass by a surface if it's out of the surface intersection algorithm's 'small tolerance'. So it was quite obvious to me to define something that covers a surface with an offset to get the desired effects in there. And that's what we called a halo.
Later in the discussions of the project we came to the point, that it's not just the layer covering a surface the place for turbulent gas effects, but what happens if we just remove the object from inside. Thus we came to the result to develop a general volume rendering algorithm, letting us as much freedom in creating scenes with natural phenomenons as possible.
Now what we have got is a quite pretty extension to POV 2.2. You just simply add a few lines into Your *.pov scene description file letting something get burn, blasted exploded or whatever nice horror You may wish.
Another idea was to simulate the interaction of gaseous media with incoming light. Grandma's old smoky hut and the London fog were subject of present interest. So I've done some literature research on what happens to the lightray in a more or less polluted or wet atmosphere. Check out the result section for what we got!
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Comments are welcome by mail!
Last update May 2th, 1996
Created by Zsolt Szalavári