Takahiro Horie wrote:
> 
> Hello. I was wondering if anyone knew of some tutorials for a beginner
> who doesn't have a modeller. I am running linux and I tried a few of the
> modellers (Behemot, Giram, etc.) but most of them required high-quality
> video cards and Mesa/OpenGL type of stuff and I'm not on such a great
> computer. So I want to become competent creating scenes only from code,
> but I am having difficulties.

Not to be too critical, but I'm not completely enamoured with any of the
modelers that run in Linux either.

> In the official POV-Ray docs, the explanation on Bicubic Patch Objects
> uses "Moray" -- which I can't use. I tried to create a few objects
> typing in my own points, but it is _extremely_ time consuming (I was
> trying to make it wrap around and connect). My friend told me that is
> would have taken only a few minutes to do that in a modeller. Doh!

Bicubic patches are like that.

> So I was wondering if anyone know of some hand-code *ONLY* tutorials.
> I don't know if they exist, or even if anyone can produce scenes with
> hand-code as fast as with, say, 3DStudio MAX, but I'd like to find out.
> When I look at a lot of comments by people who create scenes, it seems
> like they all use a modeller to produce things fast (which is what I'd
> like to do... i don't have the patience for picking points and rendering
> every 0.01 change so many times). But I do have enough patience to learn
> it, if the results of a hand-coded scene and a modelled scene are the
> same and take up the same amount of time.

Quick summary: some primitives work well when modeling by hand (any sort
of quadric surface, for instance).  Others are really ugly by hand and
pretty much require a modeler. Personally, I've done lathes, blobs, and
cubic surfaces by hand, but only after some messing around with graph
paper.  I haven't done anything remotely representational with the
hairier primitives.  If you're trying to model anything more complicated
than a teapot, use a different primitive.  If you're determined to model
bicubic patches by hand, it would serve you well to do a bunch of
background reading on the subject (Mortenson, _Geometric Modeling_ comes
to mind).  I'm afraid I don't know of any tutorials, but anything on the
mathematics of bicubic patches would be of potential use, while anything
on how to use a particular modeler will obviously be useless.

-Mark Gordon

Post a reply to this message