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DISCO BALL

   * Subject: Disco Ball
   * Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 01:29:04 -0800 (PST) [59]
   * From: "Randy R. Wall" <rrw@ecst.csuchico.edu>
  Well, sense I had nothing else to do I thought I'd give a quick try at  that
Disco Ball and see if what I thought would work would.
  I think it works pretty nice, but there were a few things I didn't try  sense
I wanted to post something for you before I hit the sack.
  Anyways, heres what I did for a fairly simple Disco Ball, but one that  stiil
looks and works nice.

   Add a Sphere
   Load the Chrome.Attribute 
   Add the RadWind texture and set it to:
    
   Radial Scale   -1.0    Color 1 R   255.0
   Z Scaling       3.0    Color 1 G     0.0
   Sweep Division 20.0    Color 1 B     0.0
   Fraction 'On'   1.0    Color 2 R   255.0
   Dist Travelled  0.0    Color 2 G   255.0
   Min Spacing     0.4    Color 2 B   255.0
   Max Spacing     0.4    Reflect Adj   1.0
   Transparancy    0.0
The colors can be changed to what you like, but its a good idea to have one a darker color so that when the Transpar texure lights the walls with the little squares some of them will be darker than others.. It maybe a good idea if you are going to have a couple of colored lights hitting the Disco Ball to use a grey color like 100,100,100 for the dark color and 255,255,255 for the lighter color.

Anyways on to the rest of the Disco Ball.

Now Add the Transpar texture and leave it at the defualts

Now Add an Axis to the center of the ball and set it to a Point Source Light and Cast Shodows.

Now your ready to render it.. If you don't have a lot of things to reflect or lots of glass objects you maybe able to speed things up by setting the RSDP in prefs to 2. if you do have a lot of things to render than set it to what need be. But if you want to test out the Disco ball so you can set it up how YOU like it then I would recomend putting it in a box with an open end for viewing and set RSDP to 2. This should work fine for these test. The Ball I have explained should give you a very good starting point, if not good enough for your project?

  The only thing I found I didn't like about it is the squares are all the  same
distance apart, but the dark and light colors help break this up a bit as well as having the windows Min & Max Spacing fairly large. You could make these smaller to make the Ball look a bit better but I didn't like the sqaures on the walls so close together when I did this. But then I was testing it in a fairly small box..I think in a larger box it might look quite good. Especially if there were other things in the room for the squares to interact with..Anyways something for you to play with..
  Well I hope you like the looks of it. I tried the Mosaic texture on it  and
that looked pretty cool too, but not quite right. I think these Disc Ball actually have many different shapes on them so the produce different shapes on the ground. But the Mosaic texture was a bit to much. I was going to try a combination of a couple of texture, But thought it would take a while to play around with this and really only wanted to see how my suggestion would work sense I was only guessing about it. And sense it did work I figured I'll leave the playing around with the textures for you..

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