CompuServe Messages

Peter, If you're trying to simulate radiossity(bounced light), you may be in for a challenge. 3DS does not calculate bounced light. However, it can be faked quite well. To get the angle of the sun, there are a few programs out there that do it. There's a routine from Greg Pyros called Sol Track which will generate a sun path based on geographic location and time of year. You can then have a spotlight move along that path to analyze where the sunlight will fall on your model. Based on the angle of the surface the light is hitting, you could trace a vector from the surface to your model. That vector would be the light and its target path that you'd use to simulate the bounced light. If you plan on doing this quite a bit, you might want to think about writing a script to help automate this process. It would certainly make animating this process much easier! Jh