I am building a scene with Blender in which I need to depict a multi-colored twinkling star, rising on a vertical path, and disappearing at clipping plane just above it.
I have done it in POV-Ray, which uses scene descriptive language. Is there a utility to export from POV-Ray and import into Blender? Should I write a Python script, or can it be done in Blender?
Blender allows you to generate a Noise modifier for animations. This could give you a "twinkling" effect if you apply the noise to a material's value such as Emission, Intensity, Transparency, etc.
First, mouse-over the value you want to apply noise to. In this example I'm using Diffuse Intensity.
Then press I to add a keyframe. If it works, you'll see the button turn yellow.
Open the Graph Editor and click on the channel used for controlling the Intensity.
In the Graph Editor, open the Properties panel by either pressing N or selecting View >> Properties. Under Modifiers, click Noise. This will give you a set of controls to manipulate the pseudo-randomization of the Intensity. This works on any value that can be animated, including colors.
While there is an addon to use pov-ray to render from blender there doesn't appear to be any recent attempts to import pov-ray files into blender. The best option appears to be poseray which can read pov-ray and save as obj which blender can import. I'm not sure if it handles animations.
As for doing your animation in blender you can animate almost every value available. This means you can animate the colour of the star or the amount of light it emits as well as it's movement. With the mouse over a value you can press I to keyframe the value or right click and select Insert Keyframe.
If you are referring to the star being composed of multiple colours then you can assign a different material to each polygon in the star or you can use an image to control what colour appears where on the star.
Of course if you prefer a text based approach there is nothing stopping you from writing a python script that creates and animates the star. This might be a steeper learning curve though. Blender's python documentation includes a quickstart and an overview to get you started.
Since then an Import feature had been added to POV converter Blender tools.
