The Alien Drone

There's the actual model for the drone that is part of the very large ship in my basement I mentioned in this post. The rendering is below. There are some important differences, which is why I wanted to post the photograph. Most striking, I think, is that not only are the translucent pieces the wrong color but also that the renderer completely fails to handle the internal transmission of light that causes the edge-on view of those pieces to appear brighter than their surroundings. In other words, from a certain angle, those pieces seem to glow.

As near as I can tell, this is a property of the fluorescent dye that is used in those pieces. You see a similar effect with the fluorescent orange LEGO pieces. There doesn't appear to be a way to specify to POV-Ray that a material is fluorescent. Likely as not, that's because they don't have any support for handling materials like that in the renderer: ray tracing is basically an enormous collection of hacks that attempts to take geometry and material specifications and turn out photo-realistic images. There's no such thing as a physically accurate ray tracer, so correct fluorescence would by necessity be a hack. Which is a pity, 'cause the fluorescent green LEGO pieces look really cool, in my opinion.


The other thing that's obviously missing from the rendering is the artwork on the printed pieces. That's because LDraw hasn't updated its part library in several years and many of the newer pieces (including the printed pieces from the UFO Series) are missing. Actually, many printed pieces from many of the themes are missing.