grady@fxgrp.fx.com (Steven Grady) (09/22/89)
I was playing with the recently mentioned Rayshade program (really nifty!), and had an idea. As I understand it, the Noise() function produces a random value from 3 parameters, but it's continuous in all directions, so natural-looking images can be created from it. How hard would it be to modify to add a fourth parameter to the function? I'm thinking a time parameter could be added, and a surface or texture could be modified by plugging t into the Noise function. I imagine this would lead to a randomly mutating surface as time went on. Has anyone tried this? If someone has (or does), I'd be interested in finding out how well it worked. (If you use this idea at siggraph, remember to give me credit! :-) Steven ...!ucbvax!grady grady@postgres.berkeley.edu "They're an insidious bunch, your killer pianos. Had one get loose on me back in '62. It slipped out of the cables while we were lowering it out of its twelfth story apartment, and crushed six innocents in an insane bid for freedom."
prem@geomag.fsu.edu (Prem Subrahmanyam) (09/22/89)
Well, you can do just that in DBW_Render. The turbulence/noise functions are based on wave sources defined by the user. These wave sources include a phase angle, which can be varied per wave source from frame to frame. In fact, DBW's fractals are intimately based on the same wave sources. One idea I've had is to make some censers with some fractal, transparent, orange fire in them. This fire can be made to flicker by varying the phase angles of the wave sources. This should prove to be quite interesting. By the way, the include file, ray.h, has been uploaded, along with some test *.dat files to work with DBW_Render. So, happy raytracing!!! ---Prem Subrahmanyam