Tim Burton wrote:

> I have been humoring the possibility of creating a texture editor for
> Pov and am wondering if it would be worthwhile and what features people
> would like.  I have been using TextureMagic 0.95 and find it to be sadly
> out of date.

I can only agree with you, only it would take quite some time to produce
something better than that, if you have that time, go for it.

> Is there a demand for this type of utility, and if so what would people
> like it to have?


There sure is demand.

Probably very different types of demand whether you want it freeware or
shareware. I am interested in freeware as far as POV is concerned, or at
least same as I'm trying to do for myself : free for non commercial users
licensed only for commercial users (there are many categories that people
don't think are commercial users but really are commercial users,
advertisement is commercial use even if the person advertising did not pay
for the advertisement media).

First it is nice to have a library of textures to pick from (POV standard
texture files).
Then it is nice to have one's own libraries (possibly in a different
selectable directory).

What I would really like is some graphical means to tweak the parameters
(like octave and the likes as well as transformations). When I say graphical
I mean that a transformation is something you can visualize with a box that
is rotated, elongated and sheared at will. The some of the octave or other
turbulence parameters can be visualized as 3d vectors. Such a graphical
interface would really help understanding the textures much more easily.

It would be marvellous to be able to combine textures in texture maps via
your tool.

An important issue is a quick preview, if you have some time and the
approval of the POV team, you could copy the code for textures out of the
box and preview this directly, thus avoiding intersection tests, that would
speed up your preview in a big way. The only thing you need to add in the
end is an extra rendering function to render normal modifications (lighting)
for which you still do not want any intersection test - you don't care about
reflections, you are only doing a preview of what the texture looks like by
itself. The real view will be done with POV, so don't bother with recreating
POV.

A good colour selection facility that includes finding a colour form RGB,
CMY, HLS or other colour model as well as from named colours (don't forget
the ability to sort colours by name or by colour with some linear criteria,
could be Hue, Saturation, Luminance, Intensity, Red, or whatever colour
attribute).

I hope I don't put too much on your plate, I would love to see something
definitely comprehensive.

Cheers,
Al.


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