CompuServe Messages

Brad, If your letters disappear when you turn on the fog attribute, it could be because the fog length is overly large compared with the letters. Try a length 1/3 the planet's diameter for starters. To make your yellow planet seem Really Bright, you need more than a light yellow color, you need to simulate a light-emitting planet. One quick way is to position a light source (with shadows disabled!) at the center of the planet, so that moving the planet around will create light effects on surrounding objects. Other important visual cues are the glow and lens flare that occur around a bright object. These are handled very convincingly by the "L" program, discussion of which is felt by Mike Halvorson to be in bad taste on this section. Suffice it to say that luminous objects in seaQuest DSV look infinitely better than my feeble attempts at creating Really Bright objects in Imagine. Since your object is a planet, a simple sphere shape, you could create a fog sphere 25% larger than the planet, squash it in Y to make it look like an oval in the top and right views, and give it a yellow-white color. This would be placed in front of the planet, and with some experimentation could create a glow that starts invisible, and grows the closer one gets to the edge of the planet. Blaq!