Jeff Lee 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?

Do not worry about site promotion. Once we have finished redesigning it
we plan a major advertising campaign to solicit texture submissions and
to aid in public awareness of it's existence. Once we are sure everyone
has heard about it we are hoping it will take on a life of it's own.
 
> > 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.

We want to redesign the site so that the background is neutral and
concentrate on exhibiting the textures in the collection. There is
a seperate group working on this issue but I do not know yet what
they have come up with in this regard.
 
> 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.

Currently there is just too much content at the site and we are going
to work on cutting the size down to a managable level.
 
> It might be nice to have an alternate indexing method
> A keyword-search function might be helpful, too.
> Of course.  But in that case, there'd definitely need to be a more
> efficient way of indexing them

As I have mentioned in other places in this thread we will be doing a lot
to help with site navigation and texture searching. 


>  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...)

I will pass this idea on to the TAG. Media is a tricky one because it
is difficult to apply to different objects and in different lighting
conditions. What it was designed for may not work when you apply it
to your own object or scene. The catch 22 here is that media in
containers require objects and we don't want this particular library
to become an object library.


  For those who might be interested we have begun talking amongst
ourselves about adding other resources like this one to povray.org.
We have not yet decided what we will offer or even obtained permission
from the POV-Team to offer any more than the texture library but we
will be working on it after the new texture library goes on line.

Some ideas I personaly have had are:

Texture    Library
Object     Library
Macro      Library
Isosurface Library
Turorial   Library
Document   Library

  We might offer these resources from a web page that we will call the
TAG home page. Then the seperate libraries will be accessed from there.
Again we have nothing concrete on this yet and even if we do add these
it will be in stages as we get time and permission to work on them.

-- 
Wishing you Seasons Greetings, A Merry Christmas, and A Happy New Year !

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