POV-Ray Lego Renders

I finally got some time this weekend to go back and work on some Lego POV-Ray renders. Unfortunately, it looks like a LOT of star wars parts are still missing from the Ldraw. Namely, there aren't ANY stormtrooper helmets defined. So, it is going to make designing my openening scene from Star Wars IV: A New Hope pretty hard. Grin. I got most of the set done for the part where Darth Vader strolls into Princess Leia's cruiser after blowing a hole in the access hatch and the Storm Troopers fight it out with the Rebels, while looking for the stolen plans to the Death Star. I'm going to add some mini-fig "place holders" until I figure out what to do for storm troopers...



POV-Ray scene.pov

One thing I'm finding with ray tracing, is that lighting is everything (duh...not sure why that didn't occur to me before). It was sort of obvious when doing the X-Wing in space before, but it is really becoming obvious with this latest render attempt. I really am having a hard time with how reflective the lego blocks are (I remember seeing this on the Snow Speeder too). I get too much texture shadow on some bricks (making them appear gritty/grainy, like on the upper slopes) and too much reflected light on others. I am going to try to add some ground fog, and maybe some smoke effects, which may help disperse the light a little, but the way this renders right now, it looks way too clear and reflective. Sigh. Below is an example of the original scene and my attempts to match it (full size is a 2.35:1 aspect ratio 1405x600 anti-aliased scene). I have to get this right before I can even THINK about annimating Darth (which I also did a quick little work on shown below)...this is going to be a lot harder than I thought.



My initial attempts to add some variable density scatter media to the full scene ended up taking 9 hours of render time to get through just 33% of the scene on my P4-2.8GHz with 2GB of RAM (with no real noticeable improvements on what I was seeing), so I canceled that. White fog just makes everything look like a flash bang went off. I think I'm going to have to spend some more time learning about POV-Ray and working with the lighting sources.