Do you know what the cause of the heights of some spires jumping up and down is?
It's not the typical fractal sampling problem, because the fractal texture map has been pre-calculated...
- Hal Lane
If you pause the movie, you can use the arrow keys to single step. When slowed down the only jumping I see is along the right side where some spires come in and out of shadow. That's probably caused by some roundoff in Bryce's ray tracing algorithm. The shape and height of the spires in the model are fixed once the model is made. Making the model does have a fractal sampling problem. The spikes are aliasing. The model was constructed using the color index for each pixel in the original 2D image as the height. To make the model have more detail I used a bigger image (1200 x 900) than the movie. Using this fixed pixel grid let me use the code I already had for generating images to get the heights for the model. The problem with the grid method is that it generates too many points in flat areas and not nearly enough in areas that need more detail. I am hoping to add a better method for making the models that searches for and traces the edges of each color index instead of using a grid. After that, I would like it to change the model as you move along so that close things have more detail and far away things less. Then, you could fly up to some feature and see what it really looks like in detail. -- Mike Frazier www.fracton.org