Found a really good article in the
4th Issue of Brick Journal about rendering legos, setting good lighting, and correcting colors. There is a great link to
Lego Colors, with full include files. There is also a great
Tutorial that shows various lighting progressions with
POV-Ray on the
5571 Black Cat set (it looks like this was the bulk of what was used for the Brick Journal article). The renders look phenomenal with the switch to radiosity processing, however, they have pushed my render times up from under 30 minutes on a 1280x1024 AA scene, to over 6 hours on a P4-2.8GHz with 2GB of RAM! But the results are pretty impressive. I hope to get one of the new Intel Core Duo processors soon, and hopefully
POVRay 3.7 with SMTP is working better there.
Below are some pictures of the difference between using radiosity and the best lighting I could come up with on two tractor models (851 and 8859). Note how, first of all, the more realistic colors look with the new includes, and also how much better the model is lit with the radiosity modes (you don't get dark shadows and specular blinding reflections quite as much, because most of the lighting is coming from a natural ambient radiosity light). New mode is on the left. Render times (for a 1280x1024 AA scene) went from around 25 minutes the old way to around 1:15 with tweeked radiosity (no HDR) "fast" settings. I can get it to look just a little better (although that is a bit subjective on different models) if I crank it up to the 2 pass hi quality, but that was taking over 6 hours per render. I also spent more time on the POVRay code and managed to get a better way to set the camera angle and use the clock to rotate through 4 different angles (45, 135, 225, 315) around a central focal point that is NOT on the origin (vector math actually comes in handy!!). Anyway, I'm playing with some other things, like adding barns and lego "fence posts" to the scene, and played around with some grass include files, but when you get too much grass patch in the scene, I end up blowing up even my 2GB render space...grin...and that is with VERY sparse grass and a very limited patch. Makes sense, once you start exponentially increasing the blade counts (at one point I was up over 2.5 billion tokens rendered in the scene...I don't know where it was when it failed).
I have begun working on Pov-Ray renders of my virtual lego sets again. I'm trying to get some more realism into the scenes (like grass, sand, trees, realistic sky/cloud maps, height field mountains/terrain). I'm also beginning to put more than just the single model in the scenes (trying to get full realistic "scenes"). Eventually, I'll try to get some of the .mdl and .pov code up on the downloads page, but it is all changing so much right now (as I learn more things about ray tracing).
I placed an order for just over $1200 of sets last week. They got here tonight. I picked up a ton of Star Wars stuff (both the UCS and new Star Destroyer, UCS AT-ST, UCS Darth Vaders Tie, UCS Sandcrawler, Jabba's Sail Barge) and some technic sets (Tow Rig, Crane Crawler, Dune Buggy (Tractor), Forklift). I can't believe how big that UCS Star Destroyer box is. I'm tempted to not open it (damn...I SHOULD just buy 2 or 3 more, because you KNOW they will be $500 as soon as Lego takes them off the market).