Ken <tyl### [at] pacbellnet> wrote:
>
>   As many of you know there is a POV-Ray texture library hosted at
> povray.org ( http://texlib.povray.org )

No, I didn't know.  After for looking for a few minutes, I finally found
it at the bottom of a page four layers deep.  Since it's hosted at the
official POV-Ray site, why not put a link to it from the "Resources"
page?


> 1.) Do you think this a useful resource in its present form ?

It's not bad.  One problem is that the "information" and "instructions"
pages explicitly set the text to white, and provide a background image,
but don't provide a value for the background colour -- which, if you
browse with image-loading turned off and your browser defaults to a
white background, makes it kind of difficult to read the pages.

Having to wade through several different pages of sky textures (for
example) is a little annoying, though if I generally browsed with images
enabled, it'd probably be better than waiting for all of the thumbnails
to load.

It might be nice to have an alternate indexing method -- for example, a
page which lists all of the textures within the given category, provides
general information about them (such as brief description, average
colour, texture complexity, etc.), and includes a link which will
display the example image.

A keyword-search function might be helpful, too.


> 2.) Do you think it would be a better resource if more people contributed
>     to it and the textures were updated to work correctly with the latest
>     versions of POV-Ray ?

Of course.  But in that case, there'd definitely need to be a more
efficient way of indexing them -- unless people were really desperate,
they'd probably give up before getting through twenty or thirty pages of
the same kind of texture.  Also, in that case, it would be nice if more
categories were added, such as "fabrics", "organics", and so forth,
rather than lumping such things under "misc".


> 3.) If this became a active resource for POV-Ray textures would you help
>     contribute to it ?

Sure.


> 4.) Would you use the textures from this site in your scenes ?

Hmmm.  Maybe, maybe not.  One the one hand, I usually spend more time
tweaking my textures than I do modelling, because I want everything to
look exactly the way I envision it.  On the other hand, if there was a
large selection of various media effects available, I'd certainly use
them.  (I *still* can't figure out how to get media to do some of the
things I used to do with halos...)


> 5.) Should we just get rid of it because it serves no purpose, it's a dumb
>     idea, who cares anyway ?

Certainly not.  I wish I'd known of such a thing when I first got
started using POV-Ray.


-- 
Jeff Lee         shi### [at] gatenet         http://www.gate.net/~shipbrk/

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