Thanks for bringing up this topic Bill.  

I'm most interested in still life scenes for myself, but do like
seeing the abstract stuff, as I could never produce an abstract
image due to not knowing where to start.

Though my main focus is on realism, I do get sidetracked and end
up not really doing much.  I only use primitives at the moment
and have for the past year, I don't use media yet and have only
started playing with Giles' make tree macro this week, currently
trying to get some good leaf textures together.

I enjoy sharing my work and seeing other peoples art, though
sometimes mine doesn't get any coments.  Such as a few months ago
I posted a scene of three coffee cups, not an interesting scene
in itself, but my main focus for that image was the area lights,
who would have guessed that?

Long may yee all keep POVing. 

Bill DeWitt wrote:
> 
> I was just wondering about how folk like to use POV-Ray. I can see from the
> various works posted that there are several camps, the realism camp, the
> humaniform camp, the abstract and the fractal camps, but I wonder if these
> are more a response to what is seen as acceptable than a native tendency in
> the people who inhabit those camps.
> 
> Well, that was obtuse. Let me try again. Personally, I am really more
> interested in what a formula can do (I just wish I had the math) than in
> what composition techniques are used to make a scene. But when I post a
> scene, I tend to make sure that it follows some of the more widely known
> compositional elements so that people will like it.
> 
> A good example was my evenly spaced flowers. I was very happy with them as a
> floating ball. I think that the scene improved when I made them into more
> realistic flowers in a vase of sorts and put them in a scene, but I was
> happy with them as a ball of flowers. Was the fact that I saw that as an
> improvement cultural or native?
> 
> Other people would be happy with less detailed flowers as long as they were
> placed in a really good scene. I imagine that they spend as much time
> arranging the scene as I spend trying to make a nice formula.  But they
> don't hand out blocky or shapeless flowers in a good scene, they trend
> towards the middle just like I do. Again, is the urge to add technical
> details peer pressure? or just good taste?
> 
> Others seem to spend most of their time doing things which add to the
> realism, lighting, textures and atmosphere. Some can do amazing things with
> matrixes and isosurfaces, but often they feel the need to add storytelling
> items to the scene. Not that that's a bad thing in and of itself, I just
> wonder if this restrains the art.
> 
> I know that sometimes (often) people break out of these molds quite
> successfully, but I see the molds as being there anyway. The last animation
> round was notable in that I saw a tendency for animations with Human forms
> in them to excel while a beautiful fish mpg was largely ignored. Now there
> may be reasons behind that other than the one I am about to guess at, but I
> wonder if it might be because most of the entries were by people (voters)
> who have worked on human forms and so saw more value in entries which suited
> that style? Does a good POV-Ray image now require a Poser mesh? Again, not
> that that is inherently a bad thing, as long as we notice that it may be
> evolving of itself.
> 
> In other words, and in closing, is the Art of POV-Ray being molded by
> technology, competitions, the artists or something else?
> 
> Looking for a conversation, not a style war...

-- 
Cheers
Steve

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