I sat at my compute until about 4:00 this morning trying to fix the glitches in my animation. They look like big, stupid, black holes in the terrain and they sort of ruin the video. If I rendered in high-quality that fixed it, but re-rendering the whole thing in high quality would take a week. So I turned off backside culling and increased the buffer size. I wrote a C program to go through and find all frames with black in them, and I wrote a ruby program to go through and re-write the script file to comment out all frames that were OK and put in instructions to set up the camera properly for each remaining frame (the ones with black in them). After a few minutes of watching Terragen re-render the bad frames I realized that it didn't actually fix the problem - there were still ugly terrain holes all over. In fact, it looked even worse in some places. I looked through the render menus and googled around to see if other people had this problem for at least an hour, and finally gave up layed down to sleep. The sky was so pretty at the time. It was a dark but vibrant (hahaha i sound like someone who likes to use big words but that's the best I can describe it) shade of blue and the moon was full and shining right between my hanging shirts. I don't think I've ever seen the sky like that before. It was really neat.

So I was laying there thinking. Since those holes were so ugly, I really wanted to get rid of them somehow. I was thinking about maybe just filling them in with green in paint or something, so they'd be less noticable. And then I got the best idea ever. I'd just set black to be transparent in Zwei-Stein, and put another copy of the video behind the first one with a temporal offset of a few frames. This should fill the holes with the texture of what's around them. And sure enough it worked great! The best part was that I could do this all in the video editor and I didn't have to re-render anything. Much improved video, now.

And then I went to sleep and had a dream that I was working with a weather simulator that used voxels to render pretty landscapes :P. There were actually 2 super computers that were doing this same sort of thing and I was talking to a guy about how the one I liked was the only one that actually had a chance to finish this simulation. It was showing a picture of a chunky rainbow-colored voxel landscape with isobars drawn over it.